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Civic engagement is an individual’s active participation that is intended to improve a community’s socioeconomic status or help shape its future. Undergraduates who engage with a community during formal course work are more likely to participate civically later in life. This outcome is important for science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) students since they use STEM knowledge to make informed decisions about public health, national security and the environment. STEM courses that incorporate this idea actively engage students in helping communities, and yet, assessment of the civic outcomes in these courses, such as measuring important predictors of future civic engagement, has been inconsistent and challenging. To address this need, we designed and assessed a new survey by adapting and testing items from previously existing civic engagement measures. The result was a 14-item survey comprising the following scientific civic constructs, that predict future scientific civic engagement: value, self-efficacy, action, and knowledge. This survey has potential to provide insight into the development of scientific civic engagement for STEM disciplines among undergraduate populations and can be used with additional scales of interest, allowing for researchers to assess relationships between predictors of scientific civic engagement and other constructs. 

Bots are increasingly being used for governance-related purposes in online communities, yet no instrumentation exists for measuring how users assess their beneficial or detrimental impacts. In order to support future human-centered and community-based research, we developed a new scale called GOVernance Bots in Online communiTies (GOV-BOTs) across two rounds of surveys on Reddit (N=820). We applied rigorous psychometric criteria to demonstrate the validity of GOV-BOTs, which contains two subscales: bot governance (4 items) and bot tensions (3 items). Whereas humans have historically expected communities to be composed entirely of humans, the social participation of bots as non-human agents now raises fundamental questions about psychological, philosophical, and ethical implications. Addressing psychological impacts, our data show that perceptions of effective bot governance positively contribute to users' sense of virtual community (SOVC), whereas perceived bot tensions may only impact SOVC if users are more aware of bots. Finally, we show that users tend to experience the greatest SOVC across groups of subreddits, rather than individual subreddits, suggesting that future research should carefully re-consider uses and operationalizations of the term community.