As was summarized by a consensus report of the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM 2018), citizen science can help participants learn scientific practices, scientific reasoning, and content and can support the participants’ self-efficacy for science, science identity, and data interpretation skills. Examination of learning associated with citizen science participation, in particular, is emerging as a distinct field of inquiry (Jordan et al. 2018), with different projects facilitating these broader benefits to different extents. 2020), and volunteer learning (Phillips et al. Research also suggests that citizen science can have broader benefits beyond its scientific value, including benefits for environmental protection (McKinley et al. For instance, over more than five decades, 17% of the research publications on the monarch butterfly ( Danaus plexippus Ries and Oberhauser 2015) and 50% of the studies about migratory birds and climate change have leveraged citizen science (Cooper et al.
The resulting discoveries have been relevant to many fields, from biochemistry to astronomy, and particularly significant in ecology. Over the last century, citizen science has played a major role in advancing scientific discovery (Cooper 2016). The practice has contested terminology, and some have begun to refer to it as community science or by other names (see Cooper et al. 2019) through which nonscientists engage in scientific research (NASEM 2018). We propose a volunteer-centric framework that explores how the dynamic accumulation of experiences in a project ecosystem can support broad learning objectives and inclusive citizen science.Ĭitizen science is a rapidly growing practice (Theobald et al. Public engagement was narrow: The multiproject participants were eight times more likely to be White and five times more likely to hold advanced degrees than the general population. The remaining multiproject participants were split evenly between discipline specialists (39%) and discipline spanners (38% joined projects with different disciplinary topics) and unevenly between mode specialists (52%) and mode spanners (25% participated in online and offline projects).
Only 23% of volunteers were singletons (who participated in only one project). Contrary to this assumption, survey responses ( n = 3894) and digital trace data ( n = 3649) from volunteers, who collectively engaged in 1126 unique projects, revealed that multiproject participation was the norm. The bulk of research on citizen science participants is project centric, based on an assumption that volunteers experience a single project.
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