Elementary students learning through data analysis and sharing findings: design-based research for community and citizen science in schools

While citizen science and other participatory approaches to science are increasingly used in schools to promote student science learning, rarely are these students supported to collect, analyze, and share their data with meaningful outside audiences. In this study, we used a Design-Based Research approach to iteratively develop and examine an elementary school-focused community and citizen science (CCS) program that facilitated students’ collecting, analyzing, and sharing forest health data with their forest manager community partners in an area of California, USA facing continual risk of catastrophic wildfires. Focusing on the classes of 3 participating teachers, we observed six classes of 3rd and 4th graders over two 1-year iterations, repeatedly observing their Forest Investigations and class visits facilitated by the watershed educators and interviewing 34 students each year at the end of the program. Our findings suggest that educators and CCS practitioners aiming to support students’ development of science knowledge, practices, identity, and agency to tackle local environmental problems should design rich and repeated scaffolded experiences with data analysis and sharing their findings with science partners who can act on their findings.