Skill-based outcomes play a prominent role in citizen science experiences as they are situated directly between the dual, intertwining goals of advancing science learning and science research. Regular and transparent assessment of volunteers’ science inquiry skills can support these goals, but we lack a comprehensive understanding of how these skills are assessed. To address this gap, we collected data from citizen science project leaders through questionnaires, interviews and a systematic literature review. Findings demonstrated that most projects targeted a narrow range of skills that centered on data collection. About half of questionnaire and interview respondents stated that they assess science inquiry skills, but many relied on informal or indirect methods such as observations and conversations lacking protocols. Less than a third of these respondents and only 13% of reviewed articles administered formal assessments of skills, such as tests and performance measures based on volunteers’ submitted data. Challenges associated with skill assessment included lack of time, staff, expertise, funding and supporting resources. Overall, our study provides clear evidence of the limited breadth and assessment of skills targeted within citizen science, and points to the need for resources that promote and expand the use of assessment addressing science inquiry skills.

Scientists are increasingly being called upon to play a more prominent role in the interface of science and society by contributing to science literacy in ways that support two-way exchanges with the public. However, many remain reluctant to participate in public engagement activities in part because they feel they lack relevant skills and experience. We surveyed scientists trained on engagement through a nationwide program called Portal to the Public and examined how participation in the program may have influenced their self-efficacy, commitment and attitudes about outreach, and perceived benefits from conducting outreach based on two-way exchange with lay audiences. Participating scientists who responded to the survey reported being deeply involved in and highly committed to hands-on interactive public outreach, felt their engagement skills had improved, and even viewed benefits of their engagement training that extended into university teaching and career development. Our findings suggest a comprehensive engagement training model, which incorporates learning theory, helps scientists build their own outreach strategies, provides opportunities to practice, and offers easy access to audiences, can have a sustained impact on disposition, perceived skills, and type of outreach conducted by scientists interested in deeper engagement with the public.

There is great potential value in linking geographically dispersed multitemporal observations collected by lay volunteers (or “citizen scientists”) with remotely-sensed observations of plant phenology, which are recognized as useful indicators of climate change. However, challenges include a large mismatch in spatial scale and diverse sources of uncertainty in the two measurement types. These challenges must be overcome if the data from each source are to be compared and jointly used to understand spatial and temporal variation in phenology, or if remote observations are to be used to predict ground-based observations. We investigated the correlation between land surface phenology derived from Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectrometer (MODIS) data and citizen scientists’ phenology observations from the USA National Phenology Network (NPN). The volunteer observations spanned 2004 to 2013 and represented 25 plant species and nine phenophases. We developed quality control procedures that removed observations outside of an a priori determined acceptable period and observations that were made more than 10 days after a preceding observation. We found that these two quality control steps improved the correlation between ground- and remote-observations, but the largest improvement was achieved when the analysis was restricted to forested MODIS pixels. These results demonstrate a high degree of correlation between the phenology of individual trees (particularly dominant forest trees such as quaking aspen, white oak, and American beech) and the phenology of the surrounding forested landscape. These results provide helpful guidelines for the joint use of citizen scientists’ observations and remote sensing phenology in work aimed at understanding continental scale variation and temporal trends.

To understand the complexities of climate change on educator-visitor relationships, we compared educators' perceptions with audiences' expectations for informal science education institutions. Our findings suggest two disconnects: (a) a professional recognition that climate change education is related to institutional mission but a lack of intentional integration of this issue into programming and (b) a misalignment between what educators believe visitors “need to know” and what visitors say they “need to know.” These findings indicate institutions' need to discuss how climate change topics integrate with ongoing education efforts and how to best approach messaging and support staff to meet audience expectations.

Summative Evaluation: RCN-UBE: Building capacity for evidence-based undergraduate field experiences Undergraduate-Field Experiences Research Network (U-FERN)