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This paper summarises the co-design model utilized throughout 2020–2022 by WeatherBlur, a community-based citizen science project. Project leaders and teachers working in classrooms across multiple states collaborated to develop iterative instructional practices for classroom implementation and professional development to support teachers’ use of the program. Participants received necessary support and training to facilitate their ongoing success as the project evolved and grew. External evaluators tracked the planning group’s co-design process, collecting data on the research-practitioner partnership and the ways their input impacted the project’s development over time. During the final year of the project, the planning group reflected upon their work and identified five criteria that emerged as successful elements of this co-design process. 1. Creating a culture of trust, 2. Time and patience, 3. Foundational knowledge and deconstruction for understanding, 4. Mutually beneficial collaboration, and 5. Commitment to engagement and flexibility. We present a full explanation of these five criteria, including how the WeatherBlur team developed and nurtured the associated behaviors and strategies. This set of takeaways is applicable to many contexts, and this paper provides insight for future co-design models seeking to replicate a development process that utilizes collective resources and input from a range of collaborators. 

This paper explores the assumptions that citizen science (CS) project leaders had about their volunteers’ science inquiry skill–proficiency overall, and then examines volunteers’ actual proficiency in one specific skill, scientific observation, because it is fundamental to and shared by many projects. This work shares findings from interviews with 10 project leaders related to two common assumptions leaders have about their volunteers’ skill proficiency: one, that volunteers can perform the necessary skills to participate at the start of a CS project, and therefore may not need training; and two, volunteer skill proficiency improves over time through involvement in the CS project. In order to answer questions about the degree of accuracy to which volunteers can perform the necessary skills and about differences in their skill proficiency based on experience and data collection procedures, we analyzed data from seven CS projects that used two shared embedded assessment tools, each focused on skills within the context of scientific observation in natural settings: Notice relevant features for taxonomic identification and record standard observations. This across-project and cross-sectional study found that the majority of citizen science volunteers (n = 176) had the necessary skill proficiency to collect accurate scientific observations but proficiency varied based on volunteer experience and project data collection procedures. 

This paper is the culmination of several facilitated exercises and meetings between external researchers and five citizen science (CS) project teams who analyzed existing data records to understand CS volunteers’ accuracy and skills. CS teams identified a wide range of skill variables that were “hiding in plain sight” in their data records, and that could be explored as part of a secondary analysis, which we define here as analyses based on data already possessed by the project. Each team identified a small number of evaluation questions to explore with their existing data. Analyses focused on accurate data collection and all teams chose to add complementary records that documented volunteers’ project engagement or the data collection context to their analysis. Most analyses were conducted as planned, and included a range of approaches from correlation analyses to general additive models. Importantly, the results from these analyses were then used to inform the design of both existing and new CS projects, and to inform the field more broadly through a range of dissemination strategies. We conclude by sharing ways that others might consider pursuing their own secondary analysis to help fill gaps in our current understanding related to volunteer skills. 

This case study describes the iterative process used to develop a virtual coaching program for out-of-school-time (OST) educators, particularly those who work in afterschool and library settings. The program, called ACRES (Afterschool Coaching for Reflective Educators in STEM), used a design-based implementation research (DBIR) approach to consider issues related to scale-up. Afterschool and library settings are complex systems that include supports and barriers that require adaptation for implementation. Throughout the design process, program developers worked to identify the essential elements of the program that should be maintained across contexts, while attending to the diverse needs of individual OST settings. Survey and interview data were collected from the full range of stakeholders throughout the implementation process to verify the importance of the essential elements to the professional learning model, and to gather early indicators of the program’s potential related to three key concepts for successful scale-up of programs: sustainability, spread, and shift. Conclusions are shared in relation to how these types of results support the scale-up of programs, and the strengths and gaps in the process used to apply the DBIR approach in our work. 

This paper is the culmination of several meaning-making activities between an external researcher, PES practitioners, and social scientist researchers who considered the unique contributions that can be made through RPPs on PES (that is, research-practice partnerships on public engagement with science). Based on the experiences from three RPP projects, the group noted that the PES context may be particularly suited to RPPs, and identified the importance of working as thinking-partners who support reciprocal decision-making. Recommendations are made in support of using these approaches to advance practical knowledge-building and reduce shared frustrations about the disconnect between research and practice in PES. 

This paper is the culmination of several meaning-making activities between an external researcher, PES practitioners, and social scientist researchers who considered the unique contributions that can be made through RPPs on PES (that is, research-practice partnerships on public engagement with science). Based on the experiences from three RPP projects, the group noted that the PES context may be particularly suited to RPPs, and identified the importance of working as thinking-partners who support reciprocal decision-making. Recommendations are made in support of using these approaches to advance practical knowledge-building and reduce shared frustrations about the disconnect between research and practice in PES.