Aligning Next Generation Science Standards to Citizen Science

The proposed session will feature several citizen science projects that have taken steps to bring their projects into the K-12 classrooms by aligning with the Next Generation Science Standards to make use of data that students... [ view full abstract ]

The proposed session will feature several citizen science projects that have taken steps to bring their projects into the K-12 classrooms by aligning with the Next Generation Science Standards to make use of data that students can use to construct explanations and design solutions, engage in argument from evidence, and obtain, evaluate and communicate information.

Presenter/Panelists include (1) Constance Walker (National Optical Astronomy Observatory) with Globe at Night, a citizen-science program on monitoring light pollution; (2) Andrew Collins with School of Ants, a citizen-scientist driven study of the ants that live in urban areas, (3) Leanora Shell with Your Wild Life and the Students Discover Project from North Carolina (NC) State University and the NC Museum of Natural Sciences, (4) Kristian Breton from the New York Academy of Sciences who is working with the Education team to design and build an online platform where youth can share and explore Citizen Science projects, (5) Sandra Henderson with NEON’s Project Budburst, a climate change focused citizen science program for educators, and (6) Jennifer Fee, from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s BirdSleuth K-12 program, which engages students in schoolyard investigations and citizen-science projects.
Moderated by Darlene Cavalier, Founder of SciStarter.

After a series of short talks, the speaker/panelists will solicit input from the community on how to use citizen science data in the classroom and gather citizen science from classrooms. Questions could focus on data mining, suitable research questions, available data sets, and analysis tools, as well as how best to engage teachers and students in the research. The feedback from participants in this session could help determine the direction and emphasis for the next phase of citizen science in education with respect to NGSS, including how to scale this for the 850 projects in SciStarter's project finder.