Seeing the Forest for the Trees: Investigating Students’ Data Moves in a Citizen Science Based Model-Eliciting Activity

Abstract

Citizen Science provides the means for students to engage in collecting and analysing data important to their local environments. In this chapter, undergraduate students in the United States participated in a model-eliciting activity to make sense of large, complex, and messy data sets gathered in connection with a citizen science project. We focus on the data moves that students performed to manipulate the data into a manageable form. These data moves showed how student groups oriented towards the data as capturing a phenomenon in the records. We argue that model-eliciting activities offer entry points to appreciate the complexity of citizen science as a practice and the value of the scientific questions that citizen science projects are engaging. This has merit not only in providing an “application context” but also in providing a gateway into participating in citizen science efforts.