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MindHive is an online, open science, citizen science platform co-designed by a team of educational researchers, teachers, cognitive and social scientists, UX researchers, community organizers, and software developers to support real-world brain and behavior research for (a) high school students and teachers who seek authentic STEM research experiences, (b) neuroscientists and cognitive/social psychologists who seek to address their research questions outside of the lab, and (c) community-based organizations who seek to conduct grassroots, science-based research for policy change. In the high school classroom, students engage with lessons and studies created by cognitive and social neuroscientists, provide peer feedback on studies designed by students within a network of schools across the country, and develop and carry out their own online citizen science studies. By guiding them through both discovery (student-as-participant) and creation (student-as-scientist) stages of citizen science inquiry, MindHive aims to help learners and communities both inside and beyond the classroom to contextualize their own cognition and social behavior within population-wide patterns; to formulate generalizable and testable research questions; and to derive implications from findings and translate these into personal and social action.
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MindHive: A Community Science Platform for Human Brain and Behavior Research
Human brain and behavior research has traditionally—and paradoxically—taken place mostly in environments that are isolated from the public: In a typical human neuroscience study, scientists recruit university students to participate in well-controlled laboratory studies, i.e., outside of humans’ natural habitat. This model is currently under attack from multiple directions, ranging from scholars arguing that it generates biased data, to communities who express distrust toward scientists, to educators who are eager for more authentic science experiences for their students. While a growing number of researchers is turning to citizen science approaches to both educate and involve the general public in science, these initiatives are most pervasive in the ‘traditional’ sciences (e.g., ecology, astronomy), and often focus on recruiting the public to help collect data, rather than including non-scientists as partners in their scientific process. MindHive (www.mindhive.science) is an online community science platform for human brain and behavior research that engages its users in the full spectrum of scientific inquiry. Taking an open science approach, MindHive features a collaborative study design environment, comprising an experiment builder, a database of validated tasks and surveys, and a public-facing study page; a peer review center; and GDPR-compliant data collection, data management, and data visualization and interpretation functionality. We describe case studies from the COVID-19 pandemic to illustrate how MindHive envisions enabling scientists, students, educators, not-for-profit organizations, and community members globally to contribute studies, resources, and research data to the platform, as such supporting both STEM learning and scientific discovery.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1908482
- PAR ID:
- 10332576
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Technology, Mind & Society
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/10.1037/tms0000088
