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As a creative endeavor, scientific research requires inspiration, innovation, exploration, and divergent thinking. Yet, in K-12 settings, it is often viewed as rigid and formulaic. MindHive is a web-based platform designed to facilitate student-teacher-scientist partnerships in research on human behavior. Features support research phases (e.g., question finding, study design, peer review, iteration), and their creative dimensions, including exploration, expressiveness, collaboration, and enjoyment. Interviews with teachers and students who used MindHive show how learners describe their experiences as creative agents. This work illustrates how educational technologies can broaden STEM participation by being authentic to methodical and creative aspects of STEM research.more » « lessFree, publicly-accessible full text available June 17, 2025
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We describe an online citizen science platform (www.mindhive.science) for human brain and behavior research that uses a participatory science learning approach to engage learners in the full spectrum of scientific inquiry. Building on an open science philosophy, it 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 where students are able to engage with and reflect on studies designed by peers from their own schools and schools around the globe; and GDPR-compliant data collection, data management, and data visualization and interpretation functionality. We describe student-initiated research generated during the COVID-19 pandemic to illustrate how the platform supports student-teacher-scientist community partnerships for participatory learning in authentic inquiry.more » « less
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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.more » « less
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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.more » « less
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Murphy, B. ; Roberts, K. (Ed.)In the summer of 2020, NSTA received the exciting news that it had received a grant from the National Science Foundation to engage in a project to help advance the field of connected STEM learning. The goal of this project was to publish resources in Connected Science Learning (CSL) that would support STEM educators in applying the latest research to the design and delivery of connected STEM learning experiences. This ebook is a culmination of this work.more » « less
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Sharing ideas can strengthen students’ science explanations. Yet, how to guide uses of peers’ ideas, and what the impacts of those ideas are on students’ learning, are open questions. We implemented a web-based cell biology unit with 116 grade 7 students, and explored how peers’ ideas are used during explanation building, and how prompts to draw on peers to either diversify or reinforce existing ideas impacted the quality of students’ written explanations. Among other findings, exchanging ideas with peers led to all students improving their explanation quality upon revision; and students prompted to diversify their ideas showed greater learning gains by the end of the unit, while students prompted to reinforce ideas, who used more peer-generated ideas in preparation to write their explanations, produced higher quality explanations. This study builds our understanding of the influence of peer ideas on learning, and offers insight into supporting students in engaging effectively with peers’ ideas.more » « less