New Perspectives in Science Education

In recent years, more than 100 projects related Citizen Science (CS) have been funded by EU Commission under the H2020 program. Currently, we can certainly affirm that CS is a very appropriate tool to promote scientific literacy [1,2]. Although a few initiatives have been carried our [3], Citizen Science still lacks of popularity among heads, lecturers and technical managers of agencies responsible for teacher education training. This means that incorporating CS in formal education will be a difficult task and, therefore, teachers who are interested in the value and impact CS will not be able to incorporate the topic in the classroom to foster scientific literacy. To fight the problem, CS Track project [4] is developing a Community Platform [5], targeted at heads, lecturers and technical managers of agencies responsible for teacher education training (among other roles as policymakers or academics),  which aims to offer relevant information about other CS projects and key outcomes as well as recommendations, reports and other resources that highlight the value that CS can bring and how it can be supported to improve its outcomes. Information is presented in a very modern eMagazine format that will include interactive data visualizations. In addition, the analytical results of the CS Track project will be published, in the eMagazine to encourage active participation between users and project researches through the bidirectional communication channel provided by the platform.

Keywords: Citizen Science, Communication, Education, Scientific Literacy, Public Understanding of Science, Data Visualization.

References

1. Pálsdóttir Á. (2018) Senior Citizens Science Literacy and Health Self-efficacy Beliefs. In: Kurbanoğlu S., Boustany J., Špiranec S., Grassian E., Mizrachi D., Roy L. (eds) Information Literacy in the Workplace. ECIL 2017. Communications in Computer and Information Science, vol 810. Springer, Cham. doi: 10.1007/978-3-319-74334-9_42
2. Bonney, Rick et al. (2009) Citizen Science: A Developing Tool for Expanding Science Knowledge and Scientific Literacy. BioScience,59(11):977. doi: 10.1525/bio.2009.59.11.9
3. Queiruga-Dios, M. Á. et al. (2020). Citizen Science for Scientific Literacy and the Attainment of Sustainable Development Goals in Formal Education. Sustainability, 12(10), 4283. doi:10.3390/su12104283
4. CORDIS (2019) Expanding our knowledge on Citizen Science through analytics and analysis
   https://cordis.europa.eu/project/id/872522
   Recovered: Oct 21, 2020
5. CS Track Community Plafrom
   https://cstrack.eu/emagazine