Science learning via participation in online citizen science

Science Learning via Participation in Online Citizen Science

We investigate the development of scientific content knowledge of volunteers participating in online citizen science projects in the Zooniverse (www.zooniverse.org). We use econometric methods to test how measures of project participation relate to success in a science quiz, controlling for factors known to correlate with scientific knowledge. Citizen scientists believe they are learning about ...

Profiles of engagement in online communities of citizen science participation

Citizen participation in online communities of scientific investigations has recently become more popular. Enhancing the engagement of citizens within these communities is a focus of attention for researchers and practitioners who want to amplify the impact on learning, science and society. This study investigates the relationship between engagement factors and behaviour patterns in an online c...

Playing with science: Exploring how game activity motivates users participation on an online citizen science platform

Purpose – This paper examines intrinsic forms of motivation and particular incidents of play, socialisation, fun and amusement on an online crowdsourced citizen science platform. The paper also investigates gamised activity (Greenhill et al., 2014) as a form of intrinsic motivation adding a sense of play to work and tasks (Xu et al., 2012). These concepts are explored through close scrutiny of ...

Integrating citizen science with online learning to ask better questions

Online learners spend millions of hours per year testing their new skills on assignments with known answers. This paper explores whether framing research questions as assignments with unknown answers helps learners generate novel, useful, and difficult-to-find knowledge while increasing their motivation by contributing to a larger goal. Collaborating with the American Gut Project, the world’s l...

The Use of Online Citizen-Science Projects to Provide Experiential Learning Opportunities for Nonmajor Science Students.