This is exactly what I am trying to get to happen in my community in Houston, TX. And the schools that my grandchildren attend in Spring Branch ISD.  I find their homeschooling lessons are not challenging and they spend too much time on games and social media. Would like to see this a required part of accountability for schools to make it happen.  See https://knorth.edublogs.org/science/trees/ for what I am trying to do, as it has become a priority.  The house next door to me may be next to cut down trees and take away my peace in the backyard, where I am sitting now.  Have you made this part of education policy in your state?  Are you collaborating with any university in Houston? Thanks for this work!!

Thanks, Karen!

I actually used to live in Houston and appreciate your efforts to increase CS competency there. We are currently only collaborating with people and organizations in or very close to Connecticut, though we envision our program expanding beyond state boundaries in the future.

Good luck!

That's terrific and amazing!  We'd love to bring some geospatial mapping projects to Belle Isle--a great project even for fifth graders (the focus of our project) if we can get them teamed up with some adult facilitators/volunteers that we have at the Aquarium and Belle Isle Conservancy.  I will bring your Program Materials and Story Map pages to the attention of our project leaders.

Hi David,

We have encouraged some teams to create engaging media to disseminate their project findings. Several project teams have done this successfully by authoring story maps, a way of combining media and maps in an interactive website. A few examples here: beavers; microburst impact on plants; Q River virtual tour ; birding. We could probably do a better job connecting these final projects with local media outlets to spread the word further. In addition to presenting their work at a professional conference at the culmination of their project, several teams have also presented their project work to their local municipal commissions, town meetings or to conservation groups. Getting high school science programs or student groups involved is a great idea. We have had quite a bit of success working with the Connecticut Land Conservation Council, both as a way to recruit adult participants from the many land trusts in Connecticut and by way of recognition of the conservation work that our participants have done across the state.

Hi Bradley, I'm on the technical teaching side of this project, but I'll take a stab at this and the project coordinator can chime in if she gets a chance. Recruitment can be tricky, especially because we aim to pair the intergenerational teams based on geography to make it as easy as possible for them to work together after the workshop on a project in their community. Teen recruitment usually starts with targeted outreach in public and private schools in the region of the state where a particular workshop is being held. We rely on relationships we have built with teachers and school administrators through this and other related programs. The project coordinator will do in person visits to schools to highlight the project and answer questions with students, teachers and staff. Adult recruitment is done through targeted outreach via email listservs, tabling at conferences and events, and direct contact with conservation organizations. Teens and adults are paired and then usually we have a few teams that require extra effort to find a teen or adult match for a given area. It is a lot of work! But, it has gotten a little easier as the program has matured and built on previous successes. Hope that helps! Feel free to follow up with additional questions. If I can't answer them, I'll pull in the project coordinator.

Thanks Bradley. Recruiting is tough as we operate on two tracks.  For the youth participants we do a lot of outreach to schools and teachers by phone, email, and presentations. For the adults, we reach out primarily to land trust volunteers and municipal staff to help us get the word out. We also promote the program through other trainings we do through other outreach efforts, such our UConn Extension-based Geospatial Training Program. The biggest challenge is then in matching up an interested student with an adult in the same geographic location. In some, cases students recruit their teachers or their parents to do the project with them. 

I'd like to echo what Cary and Dave said about recruiting. We mostly try to connect with students through school contacts (teachers, counselors, etc.), but it's difficult to know how many teens we're actually reaching. Getting into schools to give presentations can also be tough because of teachers' (and students') busy schedules.

As far as recruiting adults, we heavily advertise the program through environmentally-related listservs (land conservation, local conservation commissions, outdoor education, GIS, etc.) and reach out to other groups that might have interest, such as garden clubs. As Cary mentioned, we are lucky to have built a strong network of conservation organizations over the past few years, and even have several adults who participate in the program multiple years.

Thanks for your response. I did not realize your program was up to 65 projects over 3 years. I appreciate you sharing the resources as that will help us a lot. 

Great questions, Preeti!

We covered some of the recruitment challenges above, but to dive a little deeper, I would say we try to recruit more heavily in geographic areas closer to the different workshop locations each year. This typically gives us a good mix of folks from across a rural-urban gradient. The diversity of our teen participants moderately mirrors that of Connecticut as a whole, but we struggle with attracting adults from groups historically underrepresented in STEM and environmental fields to the program.

I am new to the Program Coordinator position and haven't actually helped any teams get their projects started (yet!), but I would say that it most likely comes down to communication between teen and adult partners. Some adults have never worked with teenagers before and it can be challenging when expectations are not initially established or reestablished. We provide training and resources during the workshops (e.g., working together reflection prompts), but the time we can devote to communication is limited. Fortunately, though, we are currently working on creating a set of Communication Pillars to better help guide communication between our participants as they progress through the program.

Thanks for sharing the information about your citizen science work, Leigh.  I love that approach. We have often thought in our work about having our teams contribute to a common research project. Considered doing it this summer given Covid 19 restrictions on our existing workshop approach.  Maybe we'll have to think about that in the future!  Thanks.

Thank you, Amanda!

Thanks for the questions, Nickolay! I can respond to some of these and will leave others to my colleagues in education to answer.

We have begun compiling and analyzing data on the impact of our participants' conservation projects, to the environment, their community and through social capital gained. For example, the number of properties mapped, number of invasive plants removed, and number of products created, such as educational booklets, field keys, etc. You can see more details in this poster presented by Laura Cisneros at last year's North American Association of Environmental Education conference.

As far as an opportunity for teams to communicate what they accomplished, many of them choose to showcase their projects at one of two regional conferences that take place at the end of the program each spring (Connecticut Conference on Natural Resources and Connecticut Land Conservation Conference). Most teams present their projects as posters, but others create ArcGIS StoryMaps, videos, etc. We cover the cost of printing posters and conference registration. Unfortunately, both conferences were cancelled this year because of COVID-19. However, we hosted a virtual conference for our program participants, and it was a big success.

Thanks, Martin, for all the great questions. I'll begin answering them, but invite our education research colleagues to add to my answers. 

First and foremost, we provide a lot of flexibility in how the teams are formed: (1) some teams may apply together, and (2) some teams will be matched up by us (program staff) before the program. Most often we match up our teams rather than the former. To match a teen with an adult, we ask a series of questions on our short online application. Below is a description taken from our application:

Before attending the CTP workshop, we will pair you with a teammate. Teams will consist of at least one teen and one adult. The goal is for each team to carry out a service-learning conservation project together after the CTP workshop. We will take into account the following to help determine teams: (1) where you live, (2) your interests and (3) your time availability.

The types/size of teams that are formed are also very flexible. At a minimum, there is at least one teen and at least one adult per team. But based on participant request, we have teams that might have multiple teens and/or multiple adults, although we do aim to have the groups be 5 people or less. In some instances, we find this allows teens and adults some comfort if they participate with a friend when partnering with other "new" teammates.  In the video footage, there were scenes with multiple teams working together or discussing brainstorming project ideas with other teams at the workshops, but teams are often 2-3 people, with fewer having 4-5 people/team.

We do put a lot of effort into recruitment, especially to recruit participants from underrepresented groups in STEM into the program and reach new communities throughout our state. Fortunately, we are able to accept 75 participants per year, so we accept almost everyone that applies, which we see as key to make the program open to everyone that has an interest in participating.

And regarding the ceiling effect, our program is free, but it is a summertime "choice" activity for high school teens that requires a commitment to complete the community project during the school year. Being a choice activity, it is not surprising that our participants come in with a strong conservation science identity. From our pre-surveys we have found that teens and adults have stronger conservation science identities than technology identities. Since the focus of the workshop is on learning geospatial technologies to support conservation science, this seems logical. Our original hypothesis was that adults would enter the program with stronger science identities than the teens, but that the teens would have stronger technology identities. Data from the first two years of the program show some support for this. Adults scored significantly higher in science competence and performance than teens, while teens scored significantly higher in self recognition of technology. There were no significant differences in any of the other identity constructs (e.g. science external recognition, internal recognition, and ways of seeing and being; and technology competence, performances, external recognition and ways of seeing and being). One interesting thing to note is that teens and adults had very high science ways of seeing and being, a construct that represents attitudes, values and behaviors that result from participating in a STEM field. The highest score possible for this construct was 16 and the pre-survey mean for all participants was 14.93. While the score increased to 15.21 in the post survey, the increase was not significant. The other three constructs compared pre to post (e.g science competence and technology competence and ways of seeing and being) all significantly increased.

Hi Catherine,

Thank you for your question! At the end of each program session in March, our external evaluator (Horizon Research Inc) conducts a focus group with our teen participants and interviews with our adult participants. They then provide us a detailed report that we use to better understand the impacts of the program on our participants and make modifications going forward.

Thank you Catherine for your questions. To add to Nicole's response: the program culminates with many of our participants showcasing their project work at one of two professional conference poster sessions. The conferences are optional but we've had great attendance by our participants. At the conference we hold a closing ceremony to reflect with the group on their overall experience. Through the development of their conference poster or end product and the closing ceremony, participants have opportunities to reflect on their own impact in their community as well.

From the evaluation surveys, focus groups and interviews, we've also learned about the impact of the concepts and technology we impart but also on how the intergenerational partnerships have impacted the participants themselves.

Thank you, Jaymee!

The virtual conference was completely synchronous. It was scheduled on the same day that one of the regional conferences was supposed to have taken place, and which many of the participants had already planned to present their projects. We promoted the virtual conference on our social media and through listservs, and opened up attendance to basically anyone. 

There was a morning and afternoon session, each about two hours long. We used Webex as the platform since we have an account with them through our university. As the host, I shared on my screen an image of each team's poster while they spent about 10-20 minutes explaining their project to the audience. At the end of each presentation, teams addressed the questions/comments that audience members had typed into the chat box. I recorded both sessions and edited the recordings into separate videos of each teams' presentation.

It was a really great way for participants to still be able to share all the work they had put into their projects, even if not in person. I think they got a lot out of the experience, and I am so thankful we were able to pull it together with fairly short notice.

Because of COVID, we have decided to conduct the workshop portion of this year's program entirely online, which will definitely pose some new challenges, particularly the loss of face-to-face instruction and engagement. We are still hoping, however, that our new cohort of participants will be able to carry out conservation projects together, in their small teams, practicing social distancing guidelines.

I appreciate the recognition that some participants may lack access to technology. I have looked into renting laptops, but haven't found a solution yet for those without internet connectivity. I don't know if public libraries will be a possible option when our workshops run in July. I'd love to hear what ideas you've come up with.

Thanks Kristin for your positive comments. We appreciate the change to do this work and to share with colleagues like you nationally, while also learning from others. 

Thank you so much, Viviana, for your kind remarks :)