Thank you for visiting our TL4CS video! Our project is creating materials to support elementary teachers as they implement citizen science projects. Over the last year, our Teacher Advisory Group (five classroom teachers) has been piloting the materials in their classrooms. Next year, we’ll begin a randomized control trial to study how teachers implement these projects when they have access to our supports and when they don’t. Our team welcomes feedback and would like to pose the following questions to researchers, curriculum developers, and teachers: 

Researchers: As we move into our randomized control trial, what issues would you recommend we be alert to?

Curriculum Developers: We’re asking teachers in the randomized control trial to complete a brief weekly log describing how they used the materials. We’re also interviewing a subset of teachers and observing their implementation throughout the year. The purpose of all this feedback is to inform revisions to our materials. What mechanisms have you used to elicit feedback from teachers using your materials and what aspects were you most interested in getting feedback on? 

Teachers: What have been your successes and obstacles implementing citizen science projects with your students?

We are excited to share our experiences and to hear your responses to Patrick's questions. Our pilot Teacher Advisory Group teachers have helped us learn about their implementation of citizen science in their classrooms using our support materials. Their feedback has helped us revise these materials with goals to best support teachers to implement citizen science with their students as they negotiate the realities and challenges of daily science instruction and to provide students with rich experiences in outdoor science and engage in data collection and analyses. Thank you for watching our video!

Great project - particularly with tapping into the existing CoCoRAHS network! Was it difficult to get district and/or school level buy-in into the project?

Kwame, thank you for your note and viewing our presentation. We have tried to communicate with districts how this work aligns with existing grade level standards, and we are still working on district approvals. Our state has many! We appreciate your note.

Your teacher recruitment story sounds all too familiar. Struggling to incentivize the project, provide adequate communications and support and recruit teachers who are still recovering from the chaos of COVID can be daunting, not to mention IRB requirements and parental consent. I applaud your efforts and this leads to my question about the goal for eliciting feedback on the question (I assume) prior to randomization. What kinds of responses have you goten to this prompt and how will you use it in an RCT? Thanks for sharing your ambitious and impactful work.

As one of your presenters stated in the video, the citizen science approach provides opportunties for "dream lessons" where students make connections across siloed subject areas.  The elementary classroom is ideal for this work - thank you for sharing your project and for supporting elementary teachers with this excellent approach. I would like to direct elementary teachers to your work if you are able to share a link or resource. Thank you. 

Great video! citizen science is rising to the fore as a way to increase not only observations but community stakeholder engagement, programs that engage the community in science from a young age are imperative. Is the data currently being stored or shared on any particular platform?

Our organization supports data storage and sharing from both researchers and citizen scientists, though specifically for water science data. If you are ever looking for a place to store/share/publish rain gauge data, for example, some of our data infrastructure might be a good fit. If you think that might be of interest, feel free to check out our video and let us know!

Clara, thank you very for your interest in our project. We're developing our resources around two citizen science projects: CoCoRaHS and Lost Ladybug. All data are stored on these two platforms.

Thank you for sharing this imaginative program. At least where I live, there has been a surge of citizen science projects as people looked for ways to engage with community members during the Covid epidemic. 

Do the teachers with whom you work encourage their students to participate with their own parents in the citizen science projects? Or does that only sometimes happen?

Thank you for sharing your work, which is so important during a time when many teachers struggle to keep students of all ages highly engaged in science content learning endeavors. As the teacher in your video expressed, citizen (or community) science activities provide opportunities for "dream lessons" to occur. One question that comes to mind is: have you considered engaging in similar work that involves middle and high school teachers? 

Thanks for sharing your great work to create supports for elementary teachers to facilitate citizen science projects! In terms of getting feedback to inform revisions, we've had recent success having teachers create short flipgrid videos responding to weekly question prompts. This allows them to talk about how they implemented materials and we've gotten more this way than with written logs. 

I'm curious about why you selected these two citizen science projects. What did you consider for both the projects as well as the elementary audience?

I love the iterative nature and design of your project!  It was so great to hear that you have a teacher advisory group.  I'm sure this brought forward a lot of positive spaces for collaboration and co-authorship of ideas.   This speaks to the sustainability of the program.  Great work!

Jessica, thank you so much for watching our video.  Our TAG group has helped us revise our materials based on their experiences. They have been incredibly valuable and have made us better and better. They feel like part of our team and we appreciate their ideas. Many of them will be joining us this summer for training our teacher participants and they will share some of the strategies they've developed in their own classrooms over the past year. We appreciate your watching and sharing your ideas.

Thank you for sharing this! Citizen Science is critical; and the connections to other disciplines is awesome.

From your research, what are the major challenges to using citizen science in the elementary classroom? What conditions support effective implementation of citizen science? Is there something pre-service teacher educators can do to support inquiry and citizen science?

Folashade, you've almost restated our research questions! Those are exactly the things we hope to learn, among others. Over the next two years, we'll be closely studying what happens as teachers use the materials we've developed, so stay tuned. We do have some strong suspicions based on work we've done leading up to this project. We are huge fans of citizen science, but, understandably, most citizen science projects are not designed explicitly for classroom implementation. We're betting that by creating project-specific materials for teachers, we can ease the burden associated with taking up these projects. We believe it's also critically important that teachers see the projects as a way to teach the standards they're responsible for. We've put a lot of emphasis on making those connections explicit in our materials. We think teachers need to see citizen science as a way to accomplish their instructional goals, not as an add on. A member of our PI team, Sarah Carrier, is a pre-service teacher educator, and I'm sure she has thoughts on your last question. Thanks for your interest!

Floashade, thank you for your great questions. When I was an elementary school teacher, I used the GLOBE project with my students. This was new in the project and included intensive training. In addition I was an experienced teacher at that point.  I agree with you that preparing future teachers with strategies to include authentic data collection in their classroom with citizen science projects is important. As Patrick stated, without citizen science support materials for application to their work with children, it can be challenging, especially for novice teachers. We hope our project will provide guidance that will expand citizen science to more classrooms.

This is great. I see that you mentioned the GLOBE project. Are there particular projects that connect well to classroom experiences?

Thanks for your interesting video! You mention that you weren't in the classroom due to covid restrictions. Were teachers using your project  with in-classroom students or were they attempting to do so virtually during an emergency remote instruction phase?

Diane, thank you for this comment! Our Teacher Advisory Group (TAG) teachers were mostly in the classroom with their students over this past year, though a couple of them had to switch to online due to quarantine requirements when a student tested positive. We have recently observed in one classroom and we were so impressed with how the teacher had established routines for both CS projects, and the students clearly knew just what to do! This summer we will train our broader group of teacher participants, with some TAG teachers' support sharing their strategies, and we look forward to observing and learning how this work can expand to many more classrooms.

This is so fantastic!!! Also Good to see you in this space Chris!

I am a member of the Society for the Preservation of Natural History Collections Education Sessional Committee and we are hosting a virtual Natural History Collection Education DemoCamp. The goal is to share, discover, and discuss educational materials that have a framework in natural history. This project would be a perfect fit so if you all have the bandwidth to participate please do! We really want to build more connections between museums, zoos and botanical gardens! Please see the website https://spnhc.org/education-democamp/ for more info, or please reach out with more questions!

We also have an Open Educational Resources Portal where you can post your finished materials to get them out there to a broader audience: https://qubeshub.org/community/groups/collections

Great video TL4CS team! Making connections between citizen science and science learning in an elementary classroom is a challenge for many teachers. The video highlights your iterative & collaborative design process and illustrates well how your educative products will support teachers. I look forward to sharing your video with my colleagues at UNH.

Lara, thanks so much for your comments and recognition of the challenges teachers face and the need to support them in bringing rich citizen science in their elementary classrooms. Thank you for sharing with your colleagues!!