NSF Awards: 1713562
Citizen science, the practice of engaging the public in scientific research, has grown enormously over the last few decades. This has brought a host of amazing new opportunities for everyday people to participate in science.
Yet the staggering diversity of projects that are out there can be overwhelming. Additionally, there can be a lack of diversity among participants in many of these projects. To address these issues, we're helping build the world's first citizen science "portals," curated for specific audiences.
These portals, which contain personalized lists of specific projects or experiences relevant to a particular group, are hosted on the website "SciStarter"-- the world's largest repository of citizen science projects. We're building these portals to allow a diverse range of groups-- from Girl Scouts and community groups to universities and corporations-- to have a personal and engaging citizen science experience. By connecting these groups with projects that matter to them, we hope to broaden and diversify the kinds of people that are empowered to use the tools of science in their day to day lives. We believe this will lead to increased science learning, efficacy and affinity, and maybe even an elevated sense of place or a change in attitude about the environment.
We will assess any such changes using novel approaches like embedded assessments, presenting volunteers with opportunities for reflection, and analyses of online user behavior.
Bradley Allf
PhD Student
Hello everyone!
Thank you for your interest in our team's research. Our overarching goal is build a future that is more sustainable, more inclusive and more engaged in using evidence-based strategies to solve problems. We think that citizen science-- the practice of involving the public in scientific research-- can be a great way to accomplish this goal because it can increase the accessibility of science. However, we are concerned that currently citizen science appeals to a narrow segment of the public-- those people already highly engaged in science.
We are building online spaces for community groups, corporate volunteers, churches and schools to do citizen science together in order to make citizen science more accessible for new people. We believe that this increased accessibility will demonstrate the true societal value of citizen science to impact people's attitudes towards science and conservation.
Our team is composed of researchers from North Carolina State University and the leadership team at SciStarter.org-- the internet's front page for citizen science. If you have questions or are interested in learning more about our project, please comment below! And if you are thinking about participating in a citizen science project yourself, head over to SciStarter and use their newly updated search tools and AI-recommendations
Thanks again for taking the time to learn more about our project!
Bradley
Ariel O'Brien
Bradley Allf
Gail Scowcroft
I would not have learned about your project without participating in the STEM for All Showcase. You are doing important work, and I look forward to learning more. How do you plan to share effective practices that you have discovered through your project?
Holly Morin
Bradley Allf
Bradley Allf
PhD Student
Hi Gail!
Thanks for checking out our project. We plan to share the results of our project with other researchers through traditional mediums like publications and conference presentations. But we also plan to write a series of blog posts about the work when it is concluded for the SciStarter.org syndicated blog network, which publishes to Discover Magazine and GotScience, in addition to SciStarter itself. We hope that these blog posts will allow not only our research colleagues but also members of the non-scientist public to learn more about the project. Additionally, we will do report-backs to the actual citizen science participants in the project outlining what we are learning.
Let me know if you have any other questions!
Bradley
Holly Morin
Bradley Allf
Erica Fields
Very interesting project. That is always something I have been concerned about - preaching to the choir. I would be very interested to hear more about your findings and about who you have been able to engage outside the scientific community.
Bradley Allf
Bradley Allf
PhD Student
Hi Erica,
Great question! While we are still in the preliminary phases of the project, and thus don't have a lot of specific findings to report on, we have found that large corporate volunteer programs have been very interested in pursuing these citizen science portals. This is great for two reasons. First, the participants in these corporate programs often come from non-science backgrounds (for instance, one participating corporate partner is a large telecommunications company with the bulk of their employees engaged in sales, marketing, and business). This helps avoid the "preaching to the choir" conundrum.
Second, many of these corporate partners and prospective corporate partners are willing to financially support the development of portals for local community groups that might not have the capacity to hire SciStarter on their own. This allows us to expand the reach of the program, and hopefully further diversify the groups of people participating in citizen science.
Erica Fields
Bradley Allf
Graham Bukowski
hi - great project when does it run til? I really like your idea of online platforms that are tailored to different target audiences - can you share more information on which groups you're targeted, and why?
And on the real time feedback loop, do you have a measure / evidence framework you use to review progress against outcomes? If so, it'd be great to learn more about it. In the UK, we're having a re-think about what outcomes we can realistically achieve through STEM activity and how we judge our progress. one of the problems we have is there is a sometimes (flawed) assumption that having engaged in a STEM related activity a child will eventually take a STEM related job.
thanks in advance for any information you can share!
Bradley Allf
Bradley Allf
PhD Student
Hi Graham!
Thanks for your questions. This project will be ongoing for at least the next two years and the evaluation component will likely become a core aspect of SciStarter functionality (i.e., allowing participants to reflect on the significance of their participation in various projects) into the future. For this project, we are targeting a variety of groups that we believe, may represent a different demographic than the typical citizen scientist. These include a variety of corporations (biotech companies, banks, telecommunications companies, advertising agencies, etc.), public schools, a university, and various local groups like churches.
We are still in the preliminary stages of the project so we have not yet set up a specific metric for evaluation of progress via the real-time feedback component. This aspect will likely be qualitative. We would be specifically interested in whether the feedback demonstrates a shift in motivations for participation from extrinsic to more intrinsic motivations as participation duration/frequency increases. We think self-determination will be key in establishing the value of participating in these sorts of projects.
I can certainly relate to having some problems with the idea of evaluating the achievement of goals based on whether people go on to have STEM careers! Our goal is not so much to lead people to pursue a specific career, but to gain new curiosity, re-establish new science or conservation-supportive norms, and lead people to feel more empowered to use the tools of science (along the lines of the Theory of Planned Behavior).
Bradley Allf
Steven Greenstein
Associate Professor
This is a really wonderful project. I appreciate how well you articulate its objectives in so many forms through your presentation. I wonder what you take to mean by "inclusive." How does the project allow for new and broadened forms of participation in citizen science by listening to the variety of ways in which all citizens do science? What are our/their understandings of "doing science"? I think about this a lot in terms of mathematics -- providing a space for learners to inform the forms of engagement.
Thanks again for this work.
Bradley Allf
Bradley Allf
PhD Student
Thanks for your feedback, Steven! In my view, making citizen science more inclusive means adjusting some norms related to how people think about participating in citizen science. Most citizen science projects engage a narrow range of the public that is not representative of the country as a whole (people that are white, wealthy and older are generally over-represented). I think this has a number of different causes, but one important one is that this restricted demographic is self-perpetuating. I.e., a more diverse cohort is unlikely to emerge if existing participants are not so diverse. I think our project helps address this issue by being specifically inclusive to groups of people that are under-represented in citizen science. It's easier for participating in citizen science to feel normative if you're doing it alongside your peers, coworkers, and fellow churchgoers, rather than trying to break into it by yourself.
I strongly agree with you that creating space for participants to define their engagement in science for themselves is key. Autonomy is a core human need and we are trying to foster that within this project by, for instance, allowing participants to choose from a diverse array of different citizen science projects from among the largest citizen science database in the world.
Steven Greenstein
Bradley Allf
Elizabeth Ryder
I think it's great that you are reaching out to non-scientists! In terms of inclusiveness, though, I'm a little concerned that you mention 'the capacity to hire SciStarter on their own' as being an issue. Is this something that could be freely available in some contexts (e.g. schools)? I do appreciate that for sustainability, you need an income stream somewhere.
Bradley Allf
Bradley Allf
PhD Student
Hi Elizabeth! This is a great observation - let me clarify. Everything on SciStarter is free: it's free to make a profile, it's free to populate your dashboard with projects, it's free to use the project finder and it's free to participate in all the projects, whether they're hosted on SciStarter or not. That said, building a curated portal customized for different groups and organizers is typically associated with a cost, since it involves a lot of work on the part of SciStarter's staff. Fortunately, however, through partnerships with a number of large organizations that offer to sponsor more local groups, we are able to build portals for a wide array of partners, even if they don't have funding. This essentially makes participation free for some groups, as you describe.
Bradley Allf
Tina Phillips
Great work Bradley - I'm eager to see the results of your efforts. I wonder if you could provide more detail abut the specific strategies you are using to encourage participation from non-traditional audiences. I assume this also means that you are gathering demographic information on everyone? Thank you!
Holly Morin
Bradley Allf
Bradley Allf
PhD Student
Thanks for your comment, Tina! To encourage participation from non-traditional audiences we are capitalizing on the fact that many diverse groups (from corporations to churches) encourage--or sometimes even require-- their group members to participate in volunteer work. Our goal is to make it as simple and engaging as possible for those groups to choose citizen science as their means of gaining these volunteer hours. But of course, simply going through the motions of doing citizen science is not enough to have a meaningful impact. That's why we're designing these portals with the principles of Self-Determination Theory in mind. That is, to create opportunities for participants to have opportunities to demonstrate and achieve competence, relatedness and autonomy. Fulfilling these three fundamental needs has been demonstrated to lead to more self-determined, intrinsic motivations for doing something. In this case, we believe the portals may lead participants to participate in citizen science not just for volunteer hours, but because they believe it is a good thing to do, or even because they simply enjoy it. This motivational shift will be, we believe, linked to the better achievement of learning outcomes.
Regarding demographic information, we do gather demographic information from the within-portal evaluations, as well as from the SciStarter dashboards, which participants can fill in with a variety of demographic information.
Holly Morin
Bradley Allf
Rachael Mady
Rachael Mady
Hi Bradley and team, I really enjoyed the video and your project's goals are incredibly relevant and important. I'd really like to learn more about two things that really piqued my interest, as I'm part of managing a citizen science project myself: the buzzfeed-style quizzes and other embedded self-assessments.
How did you develop those? What was that process like and has there been any literature that's informed what decisions you have made?
Bradley Allf
Bradley Allf
PhD Student
Hi Rachael!
Thanks for your interest in our video. Our evaluative tools for this project are still in the formative phase, so I unfortunately don't have super specific answers to your questions at this stage. That said, I can tell you what we're thinking about re: our approach! We are definitely inspired by Buzzfeed/Cosmo-style personality quizzes ("which Game of Thrones character are you?" etc.) because they are fun to do. Our response rates for typical survey evaluations have been very low in the past, and because we want to survey people at multiple time points across their citizen science journey (potentially as frequently as every month) we knew our evaluations had to be fun. So we looked to quizzes like these (https://openpsychometrics.org/tests/characters/ , https://livedataoxford.shinyapps.io/lifeinconservation/ , https://social.az1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_eM22ltCMYQg2WB7?fbclid=IwAR3U4cSYOknbVx_ABfLgGZrJjTZTPzlBWXKDZ3KEndkot6fTTTui9mpnDLA&Q_JFE=qdg) for inspiration on how to make a fun quiz that gives report-backs in a satisfying way.
We see examples from the literature of more "fun" tools for assessment that are still effective evaluations (for example, here: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0191491X13000412) and so we decided that this approach to embedded assessment might work in our situation. We are currently piloting a more typical survey approach for a group of corporate volunteers participating in a SciStarter portal in order to decide where to focus our evaluation (pro-environmental behavior? Interest in science? Pro-conservation norms?). From there, we aim to build an embedded assessment that asks the questions we think will be relevant to the outcomes we are interested in while retaining the more "fun" characteristics of the Buzzfeed-style quizzes linked above.
Bradley Allf
Rachael Mady
Bradley, thanks so much for the detailed response! I look forward looking into the quizzes you linked and reading up on that article. Such neat work that gets me thinking about my team's work.
Bradley Allf
Joe Heimlich
Hi Bradley and team! Great video and the project keeps getting better and richer. Thanks for doing this important work.
Joe
Bradley Allf
Bradley Allf
PhD Student
Thank you,Joe! And thanks for your continued help in advising us on how we might approach this project most effectively!
Bradley Allf
Saira Mortier
You've brought up a number of key things I think that people working in the citizen science sector aren't thinking about enough. Mainly, how do we get outside of who we would normally reach and engage with them.
I would be very interested in staying apprised of this project's advancement. I see you are planning publications and the like but I'm wondering is there something more "live" you have set up? Newsletter updates, Slack channel, forums?
Bradley Allf
Bradley Allf
PhD Student
Hi Saira! Thanks a lot for your interest in our project! The results of this project will eventually go out through publications and newsletters, including the SciStarter.org newsletter. That said, and as you point out, such updates will not happen in real-time. You make a great point and I would be happy to invite you-- and anyone else in this thread that is interested-- to join a public-facing thread on our research team's Slack channel. Please send me an email at ballf@ncsu.edu and I can invite you to this channel.
Thanks for the great idea!
Bradley
Zoran Popovic
Bradley Allf
Ed Robeck
Director
Having been involved in citizen science in a number of ways (participant, facilitator, and as a presenter at workshops encouraging teachers to use projects with students), I find your work very important. Your video, and your great responses to the thread so far really demonstrate the value of this forum. There are so many assumptions around citizen science that you've addressed already, and very well--that citizen science is easy for everyone to take part in, that people will stay engaged if you just get them started, that everyone will enter a STEM field if they have a good experience with citizen science, that everyone should enter STEM field, that everyone benefits from being involved in citizen science...it's quite a list, and I could go on. I guess after all this, I'm led to wonder--Would you say your experience in the project suggests that there is a strong case to be made for "citizen science for all"?
Bradley Allf
Bradley Allf
PhD Student
Thank you for your response to our video, and to this lively thread, Ed! My experience from this project so far leads me to believe that there is absolutely a strong case to be made for "citizen science for all." My PI Caren Cooper has a great TED talk about this actually (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G7cQHSqfSzI) where she outlines how citizen science at its best should function the way sports function. Growing up, the majority of kids get involved in some kind of sport even though very few actually pursue professional athletics. Why? Because we as a society value getting active, and learning teamwork, communication and leadership. I think we can think about citizen science in a similar way; that it has value because it engages us with our communities, with important local and global issues, and is a fun way to get active and learn something new. I think expanding the demographic of people that participate in citizen science will be an exercise is allowing people to make their own individual meaning from projects and in embedding its practice in school, outreach, and volunteer curricula.
Bradley Allf
David Campbelll
Program Director (retired)
I think the video does a great job spelling out the research question at the beginning. I’m curious what your response rate is from participants and what level you would consider acceptable.
Holly Morin
Bradley Allf
Bradley Allf
PhD Student
Great question, David. We are still in the preliminary phase of most aspects of this multi-faceted project so we don't have a precise answer to your question. We can say that response rates for more traditional surveying styles we have attempted have been quite low, so we're hopeful that this new approach using embedded assessments will prove more effective, particularly as we hope to be gathering data from participants throughout their citizen science experience (perhaps as frequently as once a month).
Bradley Allf
Jeffrey Ram
What a beautiful video, and I will definitely look through your citizen science projects to see whether we can use some of them to maintain engagment with students after their field trips to the Belle Isle Aquarium (a place-based informal eduation location and the topic of our video). Now, in the days of COVID-19, when at-home learning and engagement has become so important for our families and students, these tools are more necessary than ever. Thanks for sharing it with us. BTW: which modules would you direct us to for (a) teachers, (b) fifth graders, and (c) topics associated with biodiversity, water, fish, conservation, and ecology [major areas of inquiry at an Aquarium!]?
Bradley Allf
Bradley Allf
PhD Student
We're glad you enjoyed the video, Jeffrey! I'm not sure that I understand your question-- are you asking about different citizen science projects? We always recommend iNaturalist, if so. It is beautifully designed, has a highly engaged core of volunteer participants, and is a great way to learn something new about your local ecosystem. It's one of the most popular projects among our participants. Beyond iNat, you can definitely use SciStarter.org's search tools to find some fish-specific projects too! I
Bradley Allf
Miyoko Chu
Hi Bradley! Hi Caren! Your video is beautifully done. We struggle with the difficulty of assessing learning among participants who are already highly engaged and knowledgeable. I thought it was a brilliant idea to ask people to chronicle their experiences. Do you have any examples you can point us to yet, for ideas on how to frame or prompt these activities?
Bradley Allf
Bradley Allf
PhD Student
Hi Miyoko! Thanks for your comment. We are still in the formative stages of setting up the evaluations but we hope to prompt people to take part in the evaluations by framing them as fun, interactive quizzes. For example, Cornell had a great "bird personality type" quiz they put out recently that was shared widely across social media (https://cornelllabpgstore.com/what-bird-are-you-most-like-all-outcomes/). We want to model our evaluation off of something engaging like that, while still asking a variety of questions that can help us assess what learning may be taking place. But yes, framing the evaluation as a fun, interactive quiz is definitely the route we are planning to take!
Holly Morin
Bradley Allf
Bradley Allf
PhD Student
Miyoko-- Caren just brought to my attention that you may have been the one that built the Cornell quiz I just mentioned!
Bradley Allf
Miyoko Chu
Ha ha, yes, I did help build that bird personality quiz. We continue to be surprised by the popularity of that quiz through the years, which makes your idea very exciting about applying such quizzes to learn more about participant experiences.
Bradley Allf
Leigh Peake
Happy to echo the praise for this work! In our citizen science work we want to get to a place where groups like the ones you mention (girl scouts, churches, etc) are so empowered by doing citizen science that they shift into being the ones asking the questions and designing projects. I wonder if you've seen any of that cropping up yet? And also curious about the journaling piece and what would motivate someone to chronicle their experience online? If it works, that is definitely a powerful embedded assessment!
David Sittenfeld
Bradley Allf
Bradley Allf
PhD Student
Hi Leigh! Thank you for sharing your thoughts. We have not circulated the new embedded assessment tools widely enough at this stage in the project to assess whether participants may be shifting to answer questions and design projects on their own. But we hope that kind of ownership will take place eventually!
The journaling question is a good one and we aren't sure at this stage how motivated people will be to engage in that kind of reflection. We have considered framing these reflections as a sort of "time capsule" that participants can go back to later on in their citizen science journey to see how their thoughts have evolved over time. Until we try it we really won't be sure whether this is a feature that participants will utilize.
Bradley Allf
Michael I. Swart
Thanks for this work. As a research project, what is the underlying theoretical framework that undergirds this work? What are your research objectives? I read above mentions of "fun" and "engage", are these the constructs you are tackling? What are your outcome measures? Data analysis plan?
Bradley Allf
Bradley Allf
PhD Student
Thank you for your questions, Michael. Our central theoretical frameworks for this work are Self-Determination Theory and the Theory of Planned Behavior. Our research goal is to understand how citizen science experiences may impact people's pro-environmental attitudes and behaviors. We believe that these volunteer portals, by creating opportunities for people to fulfill SDT's three fundamental needs-- competence, relatedness and autonomy-- will lead people to have more self-determined motivations for participating in citizen science, which will make the experience more meaningful and impactful in affecting their attitudes and behaviors. By specifically targeting groups with low pre-existing interests in science/conservation (or at least, groups that are less self-selecting than the typical citizen science demographic), we hope to demonstrate a motivational shift from extrinsic to intrinsic. For instance, many participants will be participating in projects simply to gain volunteer hours-- a highly extrinsic motivation. If our portals facilitate a motivational shift towards participating because, say, volunteers begin to believe their contributions to science are making a difference, or because they simply enjoy participating in projects, then we believe their pro-environmental attitudes and behaviors will be more impacted by their experience. We hope to test this prediction with our embedded assessment tools.
Bradley Allf
Holly Morin
As many others have stated above, this is fascinating work and a fantastic video centered on commendable efforts- I look forward to following your project as it continues to evolve. It will be interesting if you find any correlations in these "non-traditional" groups where some seem to engage more in citizen science than others (like my first though might be scout groups going after environmental badges over church groups, but who knows, right!?). I love your social science approach to things as well. Overall, just really well done!
Bradley Allf
Bradley Allf
PhD Student
Thanks so much for your feedback, Holly! Yes it would be interesting to follow how these non-traditional groups engage with science and environmental issues over time, and something we hope to be able to track to some degree with out embedded assessment tools.
Holly Morin
Bradley Allf
Dermot Donnelly-Hermosillo
Really nice video and important work. I know you are in the early stage of the project, but I am sure it will be fascinating to see what groups get involved most and what are the areas they are most interested in. Have you considered aspects of what projects may be more engaging to particular groups and how you might guide such decisions/support greater involvement? Thank you for sharing.
Bradley Allf
Bradley Allf
PhD Student
Hi Dermot! Thanks for your question, yes we are definitely interested in what aspects of projects are most interesting and engaging to different groups. Some corporate groups we have had came into the collaboration wanting to focus on environmental projects and we have paired them environment-relevant projects, for instance. We hope that by pairing projects to people's interests we can build greater engagement with the portals. We have also considered that some projects may serve as "stepping stones" (for instance, projects that are easy to do), which facilitate deeper engagement in citizen science later on.
Bradley Allf
Larry Bell
Bradley, I am so glad to learn about your work. Figuring out how to engage new audiences seems like a very valuable enterprise. Your work to assess the impacts of the science science experience seem very important to me. Years ago, in the science museum field, we focused on developing interactive exhibits that focus on practicing scientific thinking skills and, then more recently, we have focused on using scientific evidence with societal values and personal experience to make decisions about socio-scientific questions. I am really interesting in seeing what your project can learn about the extent to which participation in citizen science projects enhance science thinking skills and lead to thoughts about applying scientific outcomes in large societal questions. Do you expect to get that far in the current project? Or do you think the current project may set a baseline of methodology that will lead to further work in the future?
Bradley Allf
Bradley Allf
PhD Student
Thanks so much for your feedback, Larry! We are glad to hear from you; I think NISE Net is also doing some really neat work along these same lines.
I think the goal for this project is to lay the foundation to expand the type of work SciStarter and the Museum of Science are exploring now as they relate to the value of citizen science for facilitating deeper science learning and science valuation. Ideally, armed with this new knowledge, we can then think about more system-wide approaches to building engagement in citizen science in a manner that leads to deeper engagement.
Karen North
Wish Citizen science was part of accountability systems so my grandchildren would get active in research for our community.