For K-12 teachers, citizen science offers a way to motivate and inspire students through participation in research that is relevant both locally and globally. Students build meaningful connections to the natural world as they make observations, collect data, and view their findings within the broader scope of the project. Participating can also create opportunities for students to learn key science concepts related to topics such as life cycles, habitats, adaptation, phenology, and ecological interrelationships. During their observations, questions naturally arise, providing a jumping-off point for authentic student investigations, and furthering the opportunity to build students’ science practice and reasoning skills. Through these experiences, students are not just learning science but are actually being scientists, contributing findings that collectively build to a broader study. Teachers are generally excited about doing citizen science, in part, because such activities uniquely fulfill the NGSS mandate to couple science practice with content and give students a real-world context in which to apply what they are learning.
Use of citizen science in school settings offers potential rewards for everyone involved: scientists (opportunities for outreach, additional data), students (engagement, meaningful connections to the natural world, learning science in a real-world way), and teachers (motivating students through authentic investigations, meeting education standards). But successful implementation of citizen science in school settings requires attention to the potentially competing needs of these audiences. For example, scientific rigor cannot come at the sacrifice of student learning, or vice-versa.
In this session, we’ll share brief case studies of citizen science projects that have been successfully used in K-12 settings, as well as lessons learned in our own work in developing educational materials and teacher training that scaffold the Cornell Lab’s citizen science projects. We will illustrate that goals for these audiences—scientists, students, and teachers—can be achieved!
