How fascination for biology is associated with students’ learning in a biodiversity citizen science project

Abstract

One way of engaging the public in major environmental issues, such as biodiversity loss, is citizen science. Up to now, the potential of implementing citizen science into formal learning environments has remained largely unconsidered. We engaged 276 German 10th graders in a collaborative citizen science project on DNA barcoding as part of a biodiversity education module. Our research focused on monitoring the relation between fascination for biology and students’ cognitive performance. Following a pre-post-retention design, we measured content knowledge and fascination one week before, one week after, and six weeks after participation in the project. Our findings indicate fascination to be a variable positively related to science learning: in relation to their pre-knowledge scores, all students showed short-term knowledge gain. In the long-term, however, students with high fascination scores retained more knowledge than students with intermediate or low fascination scores.