Abstract
Citizen science projects can be used in college laboratory settings to allow students to gain hands-on experience in research during emergency remote learning. During the 2020 spring semester, we used the citizen science project, Budburst, in our introductory biology laboratory during the COVID-19-induced emergency remote learning period. The instructors were able to quickly adapt the project for emergency remote teaching because of the versatility of citizen science projects. The goals of this paper are to describe the project the students completed and to determine which data literacy and scientific writing skills were gained through the process. The students were provided with the research question: “How does temperature affect the phenophases of your trees?” Students collected their own data and downloaded Budburst data sets from the website to compare between years and to connect their results to long-term temperature data sets. The final project was a scientific paper based on their findings from both data sets. After the semester, a subset of papers was scored by two researchers using a previously validated rubric designed to evaluate students’ research skills. We evaluated students’ higher-order thinking by investigating their ability to develop a prediction statement, and to improve their qualitative skills by developing graphs, statements on the limitations for methods and results, and alternative explanations for their findings. We saw that using citizen science during remote teaching enabled the students to gain authentic research experiences and continue to improve their skill set even if they could not be in the laboratory.
Highlights
One of the major goals of college introductory laboratories is to foster research experiences for the students (Gormally et al 2009; Brownell et al 2012; Spell et al 2014; Brownell and Kloser 2015; Bakshi et al 2016; Dolan 2016; Indorf, et al 2019; Lansverk et al 2020)
The activities included in authentic research laboratory experiences, including hypothesis development, interpretation of results, and encountering unknown outcomes, allow students to participate in science and develop important science practice skills (Weaver et al 2008; Gormally et al 2009; Brownwell et al 2012; Brownell and Kloser, 2015; Clemmons et al 2020)
We found that students had a grasp on developing effective figure labels (71.7%) but During the pandemic, most higher education laboratory courses transitioned to remote teaching, resulting in instructors investigating ways to incorporate projects for hands-on learning
Summary
One of the major goals of college introductory laboratories is to foster research experiences for the students (Gormally et al 2009; Brownell et al 2012; Spell et al 2014; Brownell and Kloser 2015; Bakshi et al 2016; Dolan 2016; Indorf, et al 2019; Lansverk et al 2020). Citizen science projects allow students to collect their own data while learning to investigate and incorporate large long-term data sets These projects give students opportunities to develop a variety of different scientific skills (e.g., collecting data, and analyzing and interpreting data). Student participation in citizen science data collection, especially that which occurs around their homes, allows students to make connections between their findings and scientific topics
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