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

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.

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).

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. 

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.

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.

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, 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. 

Thank you,Joe! And thanks for your continued help in advising us on how we might approach this project most effectively!

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

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.

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). 

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 

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!

Miyoko-- Caren just brought to my attention that you may have been the one that built the Cornell quiz I just mentioned! 

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.

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.

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.

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. 

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.