Author(s):
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/community science, has tremendous potential to be a transformative social innovation for undergraduate science education particularly when the science is situated within a socioscientific issues (SSI) based instructional approach. 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. 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. This work will remove this obstacle by creating a community of faculty among diverse institutions in the Southcoast region of Massachusetts that will work together to develop citizen science projects utilizing an SSI based instructional approach, 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. In year one, we have recruited 17 faculty from 8 different higher education institutions to participate in our project. The faculty attended our 3-day summer institute where they to learned how to create, contribute to, and maintain biodiversity- and climate-focused citizen science projects in their undergraduate courses. Over the course of the following academic year, we have been documenting the implementation of the projects by our participating faculty. Our research question guiding this work is: In what ways do faculty, and future faculty, incorporate citizen science into their instruction using a socioscientific issues based instructional model? Our preliminary findings from year 1 of the project have led to the following three assertions: (1) Faculty attended to the SSI framework recommendations by presenting the issue first and connecting to students’ lives; (2) Faculty grappled with how best to incorporate citizen/community science projects into their courses to address their issue; and, (3) The workshop created a sense of community that the faculty valued. The broader impacts and implications of this work is that it demonstrates the importance of engaging faculty in transforming their teaching, and this work builds on the existing literature by investigating how faculty engage in developing citizen/community science projects in their courses to tackle socioscientific issues.
Coauthors
Kathryn D. Kavanagh, University of Massachusetts Dartmouth; Robert J. Gegear, University of Massachusetts Dartmouth
