Jenny

I have participated in project feeder watch one season but was unable to complete the counting throughout the entire time frame. I also participate in contributing to eBird on monthly bird walks. Committing to a project that you do with other people keeps me more motivated! I don't always see this as true for students. When group projects work well, then yes, there can be lots of motivation. However, when we have our students create their projects on their own I see so much commitment and love of their own ideas. If students participated in eBird data collection, I think we would need to be careful in setting the time commitment/ duration of the project. I greatly benefitted from learning to bird alongside experts, and I think similarly there would be a lot to gain by students working along with someone more experienced at least for the first while. I would expect that by participating in eBird data collection, students would be able to identify at least three (making a conservative goal) local birds, be able to record and upload data accurately, be able to identify ways in which birds are identified, be able to develop scientific questions relating to bird behaviour, biology, and interactions with their environment.

This is something I have not done very much of. This was a surprising realization. For example, I used to do a fermentation with yeast and had students repeat it while changing a variable of their choosing. I left students to think of these variables on their own as homework, and when they couldn't I would often list off possible variables for them to choose from. I was very focused on them learning the laboratory techniques and the scientific writing components of the project rather than the idea generation, observation, and wonder part. Thinking about this now we could have spent much more time making observations about our results from the first experiment, generating wonder statements and then thinking of questions/ variables to test.

I want students' inquiry projects to stem from observations of the world. This isn't the place we start because it can feel unwieldy and challenging to prepare for as the questions could be quite vast. The reading gave me new perspective on this and when given space and time I think we can work this into our program. I have also found a citizen science project that is happening right outside our building! So that feels like a great place to start looking into ways to have students work go towards a larger project.

For several years I had our students (grade 10-11) take part in a citizen science project of their choosing. This was often a winter or spring break project. Students overwhelmingly chose something that they could do from their computers. They often found something on Zooniverse where they were transcribing, identifying objects in a photo, or playing a game. Eyewire was always a favourite. They would need to spend a total of 5 hours on the project, where up to 2 would be spent learning about the project and figuring out how to do it. I wanted students to get a sense of the amount of different projects out there in the hopes that they would continue with one that sparked their interest. I also wanted them to be part of a larger scientific experience. Over the years doing the citizen science project with students I have tweaked small things such as doing the projects in a small group to reporting back to a larger group, to try to increase accountability to complete the project and to encourage deeper processing of what they were involved with. The science being done behind some of the citizen science projects can be a little hidden. We did have success in getting students to dig deeper by asking students to identify parts of the experimental design in the project they were participating in. Our group of students is really keen on doing science and even though they are part of the scientific process and contributing data it doesn’t always feel like it to them. I never heard any follow up as to if they had continued with one of the projects. They generally enjoyed the work although many reported being either frustrated with technical aspects or tended to get bored over time. I am hoping taking this course I will see some new ways of integrating citizen science into our program. I think having the science being something that students experience away from their computers would be ideal – observing physical phenomena.

I really appreciated reading the different definitions. I had been thinking about inquiry as an approximation of doing science but in a guided or truncated way. The definitions pushed my understanding of it. I appreciated the comment about repeating experiments as that isn't something I had factored into the inquiry projects I have been doing. I also enjoyed the many comments about leading with student derived questions. I have often found it challenging to help students develop questions on their own and have sided on giving them a narrow set of choices. Through reading the descriptions I see more access points to the inquiry cycle and different ways to pique interest.