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1. Students’ Feedback About Their Experiences in EPICS Using Natural Language Processing

   https://doi.org/10.1109/FIE56618.2022.9962557  

   Anakok, I. ; Woods, J. ; Huerta, M. ; Schoepf, J. ; Murzi, H. ; Katz, A. ( October 2022 , IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference)

   This research full paper presents research around the Engineering Projects in Community Service (EPICS) program that serves two key purposes to: 1) provide a structured approach for engineering students to engage in real-world, service-based projects and 2) provide technical support and expertise that may be critical to local and global community organizations. Hence, EPICS strives to offer a platform that fosters the collaboration of engineering students and communities. EPICS helps develop undergraduate students’ professional skills extending beyond the theoretical knowledge acquired in classrooms. EPICS has been a fixture in engineering education for over 15 years, with a strong focus on curricular and pedagogical interventions to help students gain professional skills. The purpose of this paper is to explore the perspectives of over 650 students who participated in EPICS at a U.S. university during the academic years of 2019/2020 and 2020/2021. We used natural language processing (NLP) to thematically analyze students’ responses to an open-ended survey administered at the end of their semester participating in the EPICS program. Students’ responses reflect their perspectives on the design process, teamwork, real-world experiences, and the challenges they face during the design process related to other people and the program. In our findings, students’ least favorite parts of EPICS were lectures and design reviews, while their favorite parts of EPICS were teamwork and engaging with community partners. Understanding the themes emerging from the data can help us better implement community-based educational initiatives and find ways to better engage students in community service-learning projects. Our research provides implications for practice and research. 

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2. Curriculum and Community Enterprise for Restoration Sciences: The Expansion and Future of the Model

   Birney, Lauren ; McNamara, Denise ; Catherine Sanders, Catherine ; Luintel, Hari ; Penman, Joshua ( December 2018 , International research in higher education)

   Abstract The CCERS partnership includes collaborators from universities, foundations, education departments, community organizations, and cultural institutions to build a new curriculum. As reported in a study conducted by the Rand Corporation (2011), partnerships among districts, community-based organizations, government agencies, local funders, and others can strengthen learning programs. The curriculum merged project-based learning and Bybee’s 5E model (Note 1) to teach core STEM-C concepts to urban middle school students through restoration science. CCERS has five interrelated and complementary programmatic pillars (see details in the next section). The CCERS curriculum encourages urban middle school students to explore and participate in project-based learning activities restoring the oyster population in and around New York Harbor. In Melaville, Berg and Blank’s Community Based Learning (2001) there is a statement that says, “Education must connect subject matter with the places where students live and the issues that affect us all”. Lessons engage students and teachers in long-term restoration ecology and environmental monitoring projects with STEM professionals and citizen scientists. In brief, partners have created curriculums for both in-school and out-of-school learning programs, an online platform for educators and students to collaborate, and exhibits with community partners to reinforce and extend both the educators’ and their students’ learning. Currently CCERS implementation involves: • 78 middle schools • 127 teachers • 110 scientist volunteers • Over 5000 K-12 students In this report, we present summative findings from data collected via surveys among three cohorts of students whose teachers were trained by the project’s curriculum and findings from interviews among project leaders to answer the following research questions: 1. Do the five programmatic pillars function independently and collectively as a system of interrelated STEM-C content delivery vehicles that also effectively change students’ and educators’ disposition towards STEM-C learning and environmental restoration and stewardship? 2. What comprises the "curriculum plus community enterprise" local model? 3. What are the mechanisms for creating sustainability and scalability of the model locally during and beyond its five-year implementation? 4. What core aspects of the model are replicable? Findings suggest the program improved students’ knowledge in life sciences but did not have a significant effect on students’ intent to become a scientist or affinity for science. Published by Sciedu Press 1 ISSN 2380-9183 E-ISSN 2380-9205 http://irhe.sciedupress.com International Research in Higher Education Vol. 3, No. 4; 2018 Interviews with project staff indicated that the key factors in the model were its conservation mission, partnerships, and the local nature of the issues involved. The primary mechanisms for sustainability and scalability beyond the five-year implementation were the digital platform, the curriculum itself, and the dissemination (with over 450 articles related to the project published in the media and academic journals). The core replicable aspects identified were the digital platform and adoption in other Keystone species contexts. 

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3. CitSci.org & PPSR Core: Sharing biodiversity observations across platforms

   https://doi.org/10.3897/biss.5.75666  

   Budnicki, Brandon ; Newman, Gregory ( September 2021 , Biodiversity Information Science and Standards)

   CitSci.org is a global citizen science software platform and support organization housed at Colorado State University. The mission of CitSci is to help people do high quality citizen science by amplifying impacts and outcomes. This platform hosts over one thousand projects and a diverse volunteer base that has amassed over one million observations of the natural world, focused on biodiversity and ecosystem sustainability. It is a custom platform built using open source components including: PostgreSQL, Symfony, Vue.js, with React Native for the mobile apps. CitSci sets itself apart from other Citizen Science platforms through the flexibility in the types of projects it supports rather than having a singular focus. This flexibility allows projects to define their own datasheets and methodologies. The diversity of programs we host motivated us to take a founding role in the design of the PPSR Core, a set of global, transdisciplinary data and metadata standards for use in Public Participation in Scientific Research (Citizen Science) projects. Through an international partnership between the Citizen Science Association, European Citizen Science Association, and Australian Citizen Science Association, the PPSR team and associated standards enable interoperability of citizen science projects, datasets, and observations. Here we share our experience over the past 10+ years of supporting biodiversity research both as developers of the CitSci.org platform and as stewards of, and contributors to, the PPSR Core standard. Specifically, we share details about: the origin, development, and informatics infrastructure for CitSci our support for biodiversity projects such as population and community surveys our experiences in platform interoperability through PPSR Core working with the Zooniverse, SciStarter, and CyberTracker data quality data sharing goals and use cases. the origin, development, and informatics infrastructure for CitSci our support for biodiversity projects such as population and community surveys our experiences in platform interoperability through PPSR Core working with the Zooniverse, SciStarter, and CyberTracker data quality data sharing goals and use cases. We conclude by sharing overall successes, limitations, and recommendations as they pertain to trust and rigor in citizen science data sharing and interoperability. As the scientific community moves forward, we show that Citizen Science is a key tool to enabling a systems-based approach to ecosystem problems. 

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4. How Do Young Community and Citizen Science Volunteers Support Scientific Research on Biodiversity? The Case of iNaturalist

   https://doi.org/10.3390/d13070318  

   Aristeidou, Maria ; Herodotou, Christothea ; Ballard, Heidi L. ; Higgins, Lila ; Johnson, Rebecca F. ; Miller, Annie E. ; Young, Alison N. ; Robinson, Lucy D. ( July 2021 , Diversity)

   Online community and citizen science (CCS) projects have broadened access to scientific research and enabled different forms of participation in biodiversity research; however, little is known about whether and how such opportunities are taken up by young people (aged 5–19). Furthermore, when they do participate, there is little research on whether their online activity makes a tangible contribution to scientific research. We addressed these knowledge gaps using quantitative analytical approaches and visualisations to investigate 249 youths’ contributions to CCS on the iNaturalist platform, and the potential for the scientific use of their contributions. We found that nearly all the young volunteers’ observations were ‘verifiable’ (included a photo, location, and date/time) and therefore potentially useful to biodiversity research. Furthermore, more than half were designated as ‘Research Grade’, with a community agreed-upon identification, making them more valuable and accessible to biodiversity science researchers. Our findings show that young volunteers with lasting participation on the platform and those aged 16–19 years are more likely to have a higher proportion of Research Grade observations than younger, or more ephemeral participants. This study enhances our understanding of young volunteers’ contributions to biodiversity research, as well as the important role professional scientists and data users can play in helping verify youths’ contributions to make them more accessible for biodiversity research. 

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5. CyVerse: a Ten-year Perspective on Cyberinfrastructure Development, Collaboration, and Community Building

   Swetnam, T. L. ; Walls, R. ; Devisetty, U. K. ; Merchant, N. ( December 2018 , AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts)

   Adoption of data and compute-intensive research in geosciences is hindered by the same social and technological reasons as other science disciplines - we're humans after all. As a result, many of the new opportunities to advance science in today's rapidly evolving technology landscape are not approachable by domain geoscientists. Organizations must acknowledge and actively mitigate these intrinsic biases and knowledge gaps in their users and staff. Over the past ten years, CyVerse (www.cyverse.org) has carried out the mission "to design, deploy, and expand a national cyberinfrastructure for life sciences research, and to train scientists in its use." During this time, CyVerse has supported and enabled transdisciplinary collaborations across institutions and communities, overseen many successes, and encountered failures. Our lessons learned in user engagement, both social and technical, are germane to the problems facing the geoscience community today. A key element of overcoming social barriers is to set up an effective education, outreach, and training (EOT) team to drive initial adoption as well as continued use. A strong EOT group can reach new users, particularly those in under-represented communities, reduce power distance relationships, and mitigate users' uncertainty avoidance toward adopting new technology. Timely user support across the life of a project, based on mutual respect between the developers' and researchers' different skill sets, is critical to successful collaboration. Without support, users become frustrated and abandon research questions whose technical issues require solutions that are 'simple' from a developer's perspective, but are unknown by the scientist. At CyVerse, we have found there is no one solution that fits all research challenges. Our strategy has been to maintain a system of systems (SoS) where users can choose 'lego-blocks' to build a solution that matches their problem. This SoS ideology has allowed CyVerse users to extend and scale workflows without becoming entangled in problems which reduce productivity and slow scientific discovery. Likewise, CyVerse addresses the handling of data through its entire lifecycle, from creation to publication to future reuse, supporting community driven big data projects and individual researchers. 

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