Contributions from citizen science to science education: an examination of a biodiversity citizen science project with schools in Central Europe

ABSTRACT

Despite the rising popularity of Citizen Science (CS) projects, there is little empirical evidence for effects on learning outcomes, particularly when young people are involved. It is also often not clear how CS projects are linked to science education (SE) research. The aim of this study was to examine biodiversity CS projects in an outdoor school class context and to measure the effects on individual learning outcomes (ILOs) with a perspective for SE. Five learning outcomes considered important for CS were tested: interest, self-efficacy/mastery, motivation, behaviour and attitude. These ILOs were measured via eight different scales and tested in an evaluation study of a large CS project with 428 students aged 8–18. Students recorded hedgehogs, wild bee activity, birds and butterflies in gardens. Results showed that students’ interest and motivation, as well as perceived mastery increased during the project. Most remarkably, positive attitudes towards wild animals, natural gardens and biodiversity rose significantly. For most ILOs there were significant differences between age groups: Primary school students showed the highest ILOs and also provided most database entries. The authors describe how well biodiversity CS projects contribute to SE aims and how discrepancies between educational and scientific aims in CS projects may be addressed.

KEYWORDS:

• Citizen science
• biodiversity
• evaluation
• learning outcomes
• science education
• students
• motivation
• attitude

Acknowledgements

The project used for the evaluation study was funded by the ‘Sparkling Science Programme’ of the Austrian Federal Ministry of Science, Research and Economy, for a duration of two years (2014–2016). We would like to thank all participating students, teachers and fellow scientists Bärbel Pachinger, Kristina Plenk, Stefanie Stadler, Thomas Schauppenlehner, Manfred Bardy-Durchhalter and Monika Kriechbaum for their engagement and contributions. We are also grateful to two anonymous reviewers for their helpful suggestions to improve the manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Julia Kelemen-Finan http://orcid.org/0000-0003-4003-3459

Martin Scheuch http://orcid.org/0000-0003-3183-799X

Silvia Winter http://orcid.org/0000-0002-8322-7774

Notes

1 https://www.sparklingscience.at/en/projects/show.html?--typo3_neos_nodetypes-page[id]=773.

Additional information

Funding

The project used for the evaluation study was funded by the ‘Sparkling Science Programme’ of the Austrian Federal Ministry of Science, Research and Economy, for a duration of two years (2014–2016).