PUBLICATION: Elementary students learning through data analysis and sharing findings
Design-based research for community and citizen science in schools
Alexandra Race, a postdoctoral scholar at CCCS, and a research team of fellow post-docs, graduate students in the SOE, and non-profit collaborators recently published Elementary students learning through data analysis and sharing findings: design-based research for community and citizen science in schools. Centered around the Our Forests program, this research paper emphasizes the importance of involving students at every step of the data collection and research analysis process. A Design-based Research (DBR) approach was used to modify and improve the program’s curriculum and structure as the team received feedback from participants between iterations of the program. Students from 3rd to 5th grade in rural California gathered, interpreted, and shared data about local forest wildfire risk with stakeholders in this unique school-based community and citizen science program. The program’s approach scaffolded the students’ environmental agency development. It also fostered more engagement than traditional community and citizen science approaches, which often do not allow students to analyze and present their findings or see the results of their data collection. Alexandra and her team found that the project shifted the students’ focus from passive learning in a classroom to active, engaging, and participatory focused education.
You can read all about Alexandra’s paper and the details of their DBR approach at Taylor & Francis online here.
