Seeing the Forest for the Trees: Investigating Students¿ Data Moves in a Citizen Science Based Model-Eliciting Activity Chapter in Scopus uri icon

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.

publication date

  • January 1, 2023