Students Discover: What emerges when scientists and teachers co-create citizen science?

Students Discover is an NSF-sponsored Math-Science Partnership project that brings authentic research into middle school classrooms through citizen science (education.yourwildlife.org). In July 2014, the NC Museum of Natural... [ view full abstract ]

Students Discover is an NSF-sponsored Math-Science Partnership project that brings authentic research into middle school classrooms through citizen science (education.yourwildlife.org). In July 2014, the NC Museum of Natural Sciences hosted its first cohort of middle-school teachers who worked in teams with post-doctoral scientists to co-create four original citizen science projects and associated lesson plans: 1) studying ancient shark diversity using 10 million year old fossils, 2) understanding urban mammal movement as revealed by camera traps, 3) investigating the role of beneficial microbes on dandelion survival, and 4) studying human evolution through the mites that live in the pores of our faces.
We will share the outcomes of Students Discover in its first project year. Based on observations and evaluations made by our partner research team, NCSU’s Friday Institute for Educational Innovation, we will discuss the effectiveness of these projects as they contribute to the formal classroom learning of students in participating classrooms, as well as our efforts to scale projects to engage students throughout the US and the world. Our initial observations have revealed an unexpected synergy between the postdoctoral scientists and their teachers that was transformative for both parties, in terms of learning how research is performed and more broadly understood. We will therefore discuss our assessment of how central the experience of scientist-teacher co-creation is to the success of citizen science intended for implementation in the classroom.