Science and Environmental Learning

At its core, Youth-Focused Community and Citizen Science is all about when young people play a role in creating new scientific knowledge, becoming experts in their local environment, and then using that new knowledge to take action and make change.

The Center for Community and Citizen Science works to understand how YCCS might lead to environmental science learning, and how educators can use community and citizen science projects to meet their educational goals. This led to the development of this research-based framework, that helps us as educators think beyond what YCCS activities to do, and consider how to design and facilitate those activities for meaningful student learning.

The Framework has been used as the foundation, and is embedded into our community and citizen science resource materials - highlighting core activities like developing youth expertise - that intersect with key educator practices – such as shifting instruction to position youth as experts. These together facilitate key youth practices, for example, taking ownership of data quality, that lead to learning and environmental science agency. This framework helps us understand how what we do leads to our desired outcomes.

Based on that research- we found that Youth-Focused Community and Citizen science offers and allows the opportunity for youth to:

• Learn about their local environment and community
• Determine what kind of change to create in their community. It gives students an opportunity to shape their local environment
• Opportunity to gain ownership OR feel part of OR have access to “science” (a field that is not always inclusive)
• Contribute to environmental science research

By engaging in a YCCS project, you will see that student engagement is based on authentic real world science, allowing them to truly engage in all three dimensions of the Next Generation Science Standards, or NGSS. They are working on the practice of analyzing and interpreting data, deepening their content knowledge focused on the disciplinary core ideas, and applying their model of how the system of their school campus functions across a variety of scientific domains. In addition to building their science literacy by engaging in authentic research, students are also aware of the human impact, and the interrelated nature of our ecosystems. In all grade levels, K-12, YCCS also allows for not only engagement in all three dimensions of NGGS, but also engagement with Common Core English Language Arts and math standards by giving students a way to apply their learning. Their reading and research has new purpose and meaning, as they begin to realize their own ability to make an impact.

By engaging students (and families) in a participatory/citizen science project on school campus, or at home, classes can build a sense of community while attending to the Social and Emotional Learning needs as well as academic learning needs of students.