Project summary
Dates: April 2017 - March 2022
Focus: Learning through participation in citizen science
Funding: Wellcome & UK ESRC (UK) plus National Science Foundation (USA)
Principal investigator: Lucy Robinson
Please contact:
Dates: April 2017 - March 2022
Focus: Learning through participation in citizen science
Funding: Wellcome & UK ESRC (UK) plus National Science Foundation (USA)
Principal investigator: Lucy Robinson
Please contact:
This project studied what impact citizen science projects have on the young people that take part in them.
The LEARN CitSci project was an international partnership bringing together citizen science practitioners and educational researchers from six organisations in the UK and the US.
The study was led by Lucy Robinson, Citizen Science Manager at the Natural History Museum, London and Prof Heidi Ballard of the University of California, Davis School of Education.
The study aimed to understand how young people aged 5-19 years develop knowledge, practices and agency with environmental science through their participation in natural history museum-led citizen science and crowdsourcing projects. Agency, in this context, is the ability to take meaningful personal action in their life or community.
Our project objectives included:
What is the nature of the learning environments, and what activities do young people engage in, when participating in NHM-led citizen science?
To what extent do young people develop the following three science learning outcomes:
What programme features and settings in NHM-led citizen science foster the three science learning outcomes outlined above?
The LEARN CitSci team of practitioners and researchers employed qualitative and quantitative research methods to characterize the settings and activities in these programs, to capture the learning processes and outcomes, and to identify how program features and settings in natural history museum-led citizen science foster or hinder environmental science learning.
Our methods ranged from ethnographic field notes and interviews, to surveys and online learning analytics.
University of California, Davis
California Academy of Sciences
Natural History Museum of Los Angeles
The Open University
The University of Oxford