Connecting Undergraduates to Biodiversity Instruction through Citizen Science

This project aims to serve the national interest by establishing teaching practices that support active engagement with real-world scientific research to increase student retention in the sciences. Community participation in formal scientific research, or citizen science, has tremendous potential to be a transformative social innovation for undergraduate science education and learning.

Students engaged with citizen science projects are active partners in their learning, providing them with a deeper understanding of the importance of science to the community and increasing the likelihood that they will maintain a career path in the sciences. One major obstacle to bringing citizen science-related curriculum to undergraduates is that faculty lack the educational training needed to translate their scientific expertise into classroom activities that fully engage students.

This work will remove this obstacle by creating a community of faculty among diverse institutions in the South Coast region of Massachusetts that will work together to develop citizen science projects, monitor how they execute their projects, and assess the impacts on their students. Using citizen science projects related to biodiversity and climate change, this project will test a model for how to shift faculty participants from traditional lecture to active involvement of students in real-world data collection and analysis, resulting in the development of a blueprint for expanding citizen science-based undergraduate curriculum to other regions of the country and to other scientific subject areas.

Thus, in addition to making a quantum leap in improving retention in undergraduate science at a regional scale, this project’s novel educational approach will make a significant contribution to scientific research efforts aimed at conserving and restoring native biodiversity threatened by human-induced environmental change.

Research has shown that teaching innovations that involve active participation in real-world science exploration improves undergraduate student attitudes, achievement, and retention. Yet, most science faculty, while content experts in their discipline, often lack pedagogical training needed to translate their scientific expertise into curriculum that fully engages their students.

The goal of this project is to provide this type of support for college science faculty through the incorporation of community-based or ‘citizen’ science into their undergraduate classrooms. The means to accomplish this goal will be a series of professional development workshops (Summer Institutes) where faculty from the South Coast region of Massachusetts will gather to learn how to create, contribute to, and maintain biodiversity- and climate-focused citizen science projects in their undergraduate courses.

By providing the tools for faculty to shift from a traditional lecture format to the active involvement of students in real-world data collection and analysis, this project expects to effect a substantial increase in student retention at a regional scale. This project will be thoroughly documented by a research plan that investigates the transformational nature of the project through a mixed methods design.

It includes rigorous assessment and an experienced advisory board. Educational data collected in this project will be used to elucidate the best methods to develop socio-scientific issues-based citizen science projects and demonstrate a means to improve retention in science. The projects will be coordinated and supported by the PI team through the Kaput Center for Research & Innovation in STEM Education which has the infrastructure and expertise needed for widespread coordination and dissemination to connect the public with scientists.

The NSF IUSE: EDU Program supports research and development projects to improve the effectiveness of STEM education for all students. Through its Engaged Student Learning track, the program supports the creation, exploration, and implementation of promising practices and tools.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.