Thanks for your interest Mary. 

Thanks Mary for watching the video. Long time no see ;) 

I did involve some pre-service teachers in community science work a few years ago, and our study found that they continued to implement this work with their students, with excellent results. Community-based science is an excellent example of culturally relevant pedagogy, allowing students to engage in meaningful projects that are important to their local community.

Thanks for sharing your experience and the insight Meghan! Culturally relevant pedagogy is most definitely one of our goals with the citizen science programming in our pre-service teacher development.

The first scholar has implemented this in their classroom now that they are an in-service teacher and we anticipate that the others will do the same so that we hope to have a similar outcome as you are reporting.   I think that you are correct that the projects need to be related to something that is important locally so that the choice of the project is an important component to the success and the long-term implementation by the teachers.  

Thanks Pat! I also enjoyed watching your video on using the COVID-19 pandemic to teach scientific literacy. 

Thanks Barry. Kara's story is most definitely a model for all the students in our program : minus winning grant funding to implement the project - although the opportunity to apply for such funding through our regional Noyce organization is available to all our graduates. We currently have 5 graduates from our program, and I know that at least three of them are implementing their citizen science projects in their classroom. To bring the program to scale more, this summer we are partnering these recent STEM Teaching graduates with our current scholars who are conducting their citizen science projects as sort of middle resource personnel between the University STEM faculty and the High School Teachers for our current scholars. Since our recent graduates have been in the shoes of these current scholars, our hope is that the recent graduates can help the current scholars navigate this dual mentoring experience better. 

Wonderful - thank you for clarifying, Kwame!

No thank you Barry! Your question was so insightful! Much appreciated. 

We typically engage in two or three different citizen science projects each year.  For the Lionfish project, students presented their findings highlighting impacts from invasive Lionfish on popular commercial and sportfish, at school assemblies, regional science symposia, and public science festivals.

You may be interested in the publications for the Lionfish project.

https://biodiversitygenomics.net/site/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/iBOL-Barcode-Bulletin-Sept-2016.pdf

https://online.ucpress.edu/abt/article/81/3/169/91889/Invasive-Aliens-A-Student-Citizen-Science-Activity

Hi Margie, 

Thanks for your interest in our project.  It is always helpful to use real-world problems to engage learners and this has become even more important with the challenges of virtual engagement. 

Hi Brian! Thank you for your kind comments! Our team has floated the idea of publishing the lesson plans on and off but now that you mention there would be interest, we would certainly make that more of a priority! We have published previous lesson plans in the past such as on our Lionfish project which our PI John Pecore provided some links to in an earlier post.

April, thanks so much for you feedback! For microplastics, the project focused on counting microfibers, microbeads, and microfragments found in either water samples or seafood tissue. I know that Kara's lesson plan focused specifically in microplastics in water samples. As far as I know, the data is not currently recorded on an online platform. Some teaching resources that the science faculty mentor (Alexis Janosik) had developed that informed Kara's lesson planning are as follows:
https://polar-ice.org/polar-data-stories/educat...

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1U-T8BmTGUUL_5_...

https://polar-ice.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/0...

Pendred, thanks so much for your feedback and honored to have you view our video. Also the book looks like a great resource for teaching about or inspiring students to address microplastics!

Curious as to what the "citizen mathematics aspects" of the project area?

Hi Deborah, 

Kwame can better answer this questions, but I thought I would give it a go since we are just about out of time to comment.  In addition to Citizen Science projects, this program also has Citizen Mathematics projects.  It is my understanding that the mathematics projects focus more closely on the data analysis aspects and/or larger data sets rather than on the collection of Scientific Data.  Obviously data analysis and/or data illustrations are likely aspects of all Citizen Science projects as well.  I believe that last year they did a project on mapping the risk of power outages from hurricanes.