Rhiannon Crain

Citizen science has proliferated in the last decade, becoming a critical form of public engagement in science and an increasingly important research tool for the study of large-scale patterns in nature. While citizen science is already interdisciplinary, it has untapped potential to build capacity for transformative research on coupled human and natural systems. New tools have begun to collect paired ecological and social data from the same individual; this will allow for detailed examination of feedbacks at the level of individuals and potentially provides much-needed data for agent-based modeling. With the impending professionalization of citizen science, the field can benefit from integrating a coupled systems perspective, including a broadening of the social science perspectives considered. This can lead to new schema and platforms to increase support for large-scale research on coupled natural and human systems.

The social Web is swiftly becoming a living laboratory for understanding human cooperation on massive scales. It has changed how we organize, socialize, and tackle problems that benefit from the efforts of a large crowd. A new, applied, behavioral ecology has begun to build on theoretical and empirical studies of cooperation, integrating research in the fields of evolutionary biology, social psychology, social networking, and citizen science. Here, we review the ways in which these disciplines inform the design of Internet environments to support collective pro-environmental behavior, tapping into proximate prosocial mechanisms and models of social evolution, as well as generating opportunities for ‘field studies’ to discover how we can support massive collective action and shift environmental social norms.

Citizen science is an indispensable means of combining ecological research with environmental education and natural history observation. Approaches range from community-based monitoring to using the Internet to crowd-source everything from data collection to discovery. With its new tools and mechanisms for engaging learners, citizen science pushes the envelope of what ecologists can do, both in expanding the potential for geographical ecology research and in supplementing existing, but localized, research programs. The primary impacts of citizen science are seen in studies of global climate change biology, including studies of phenology, landscape ecology, and macro-ecology. Research impacts are also seen in the ecology of rare and invasive species, disease ecology, population ecology, community ecology, and ecosystem ecology. A growing field, citizen science and the ecological data it collects can be viewed as a public good that is generated through increasingly collaborative tools and resources, while supporting public participation in science and earth-stewardship.

How we communicate the dangers of climate change may influence attitudes, intentions, and behaviors. Here we test two pairs of positive and negative framing statements with citizen scientists interested in gardening and birdwatching. Mentioning dangers for humans did not increase participants’ interest in taking personal action on climate change, but mentioning dangers for birds was highly effective. Highlighting the positive collective impacts of small behavioral changes also increased participants’ interest in taking personal action. These results suggest that while some dire messages are ineffective, those that evoke concern for a target species well-matched to the message audience may be as successful as positive messages.

This article is intended to spark a discussion between two research communities—scholars who study learning and scholars who study educational organizations. A secondary purpose is to encourage researchers to look beyond schools to examine learning in other types of educational organizations. The authors outline a framework to guide research on the relationship between learning and the social contexts afforded by formal organizations. The framework combines elements of cultural historical activity theory, a sociocultural theory of learning, and institutional theory, which is a constructivist theory of organization. The authors employ preliminary findings from research and secondary historical accounts to illustrate the potential of the framework for guid- ing research that ties learning to contexts in formal organizations.

To really ask the question “what counts as science” we need to examine the norms, values, and cultural scripts that animate our answers. What sorts of history, authority, and schemata compose our commonsense stances, and exert influence just beneath the surface of our otherwise seemingly rational justifications for what counts? Although there are many cultural scripts that feed answers to this deceptively simple question we argue here that implicit across both academic and popular accounts of “what counts” is the cultural script of “hands-on.”

The goal of this study is to explore new tools for analyzing scientific sense making in out-of-school settings. Although such measures are now common in science classroom research, dialogically-based methodological approaches are relatively new to informal learning research. Such out-of-classroom settings have more recently become a breeding ground for new design approaches for tracking scientific talk and ideas within complex data sets. The research reported here seeks to understand the language people do use to make sense of the life sciences over time. Another goal of this study is to track biological themes over time, using a new analytical scheme, Tool for Observing Biological Talk Over Time (TOBTOT). Our analyses are linked to and informed by tensions between particularistic and holistic data collection and analysis, qualitative and quantitative representations, and everyday and formal science discourse. These tensions and our analyses are linked to larger theoretical frameworks and to the recursive interplay between theory and practice.

This study examines the historical conditions that fostered significant reform in science education. To understand these conditions, we employ a framework drawn from the new institutionalism in organization theory to study the founding and early development of the Exploratorium—a prominent science center that greatly impacted the field of science education. We examine how the Exploratorium employed institutional resources that were available in its environment to develop a new type of organization: an interactive science center. Our findings reveal that the Exploratorium was shaped by the state, which includes all levels of government; the mass media; and the professions, including science, education, and museums. In addition, we explore the pivotal role an individual, Frank Oppenheimer, played in leveraging the institutional environment in which an organization was develop- ing. Our findings suggest that (a) reform in science education may be more profoundly advanced by the development of a new type of organization than by “tinkering” with an existing type of organization such as schools, and (b) that interactive science centers should exercise caution in navigating the changing seas of science education by maintaining their core mission and collaborating with new types of organizations that arise in response to the changing environment.

Interactive science centers are unique players in the science education community, but their positioning as both authorities on science and providers of “free choice” learning presents learning researchers with a problematic contradiction rooted in the complexities of trying to be both ‘scientific’ and ‘education’ organizations. Using insight from cultural historical activity and new institutionalism of organizations theories this study found that the activity of Exploratorium visitors recreated much of this “core” contradiction. Thirty-five families visiting the Exploratorium were invited to “draw the Exploratorium” and to explain their drawings. Analyses of these drawings and video of the families’ discussions revealed that families responded to the activity by drawing and talking about the Exploratorium in very similar ways. Their ideas about the Exploratorium show that the contradictory position of the organization shapes the context for learning through its purposeful lack of regulative structure, and consequential reliance on cultural-cognitive and normative systems as resources for information about how to conduct activity in the museum. The result is learning activity that depends on both a complex relationship between visitor and material, and on the visitor’s self-regulation through school-like definitions of science learning. This necessarily reframes the contradiction embodied by interactive science centers and suggests that interactive science centers need to proceed carefully as they move forward as organizations for learning. In addition, the study extends work on interactive exhibits showing that families value physical interaction as a source of knowledge generation. This finding directly conflicts with critiques of interactive science centers as providers of “gratuitous interactivity.”

12 The Importance of Objects in Talking Science The Special Case of English Language Learners Doris Ash, Kip Tellez, and Rhiannon Crain Introduction When you think about learning science, what kind of environment comes to mind? Do you think of a classroom, a ...

At the Cornell Lab of Ornithology we have a long history of collecting information about backyard birds from the public, but we know little about the residential habitats where those observations take place. Upwards of 2.1 million acres are converted to residential use each year. YardMap seeks to use a new kind of citizen science to enrich our understanding of how birds use residential habitat and the potential impacts of cumulative restoration efforts in urban and suburban landscapes. Birds provide a constant, active connection to
the natural world for many people, and backyards, patios, and porches are often where that connection occurs. While many recommendations exist explaining how people can modify
their yards to help birds, most are not empirically based. YardMap places the issue of urban and suburban ecology front and center with a new web application that allows people
to produce detailed and visually engaging maps of their yards, schoolyards, and rooftop gardens, form communities of practice around conservation, and contribute to research on the cumulative impacts of residential habitat restoration efforts and their impacts on birds. Does habitat enhancement over a significant area make a difference for birds? Does creating corridors of habitat in large cities help to connect birds with the resources they need? Together we can dig deeper into the mysteries of urban ecology even as it becomes increasingly urgent to do so.