Enhancing Participation Through Inquiry Learning and Citizen Science: Science for Everyone

Eileen Scanlon, Christothea Herodotou

2024

Abstract

Volunteers in citizen science projects contribute their labour to the activities of science, becoming involved in the advancement of science. With the advent of digital technologies, the involvement of non-scientists in scientific projects has mushroomed (see Curtis et al., 2018). However, the nature of the participation in citizen science has been limited in a variety of ways. We have adopted the term citizen inquiry to describe our approach. Our interest in inquiry learning was developed in the Personal Inquiry project (see Sharples et al., 2015) which developed an approach to supporting inquiries of personal relevance in science learning. We developed software to support pupils, our first iteration of the nQuire platform. Further projects explored ways in which such software could be of use in encouraging participation in citizen science inquiry. We designed the later iterations of the nQuire platform (nquire.org.uk) as a citizen science and inquiry learning tool, that can support any individual or organisation (with or without research background) to set up and manage their own scientific investigations. We report here on the impact of this work over a fifteen-year period. We discuss the ways in which this software has allowed enhanced participation in citizen projects and the potential development of this approach for democratising citizen science.

Paper Citation

in Harvard Style

Scanlon E. and Herodotou C. (2024). Enhancing Participation Through Inquiry Learning and Citizen Science: Science for Everyone. In Proceedings of the 16th International Conference on Computer Supported Education - Volume 1: CSEDU; ISBN 978-989-758-697-2, SciTePress, pages 557-563. DOI: 10.5220/0012732800003693

in Bibtex Style

@conference{csedu24,
author={Eileen Scanlon and Christothea Herodotou},
title={Enhancing Participation Through Inquiry Learning and Citizen Science: Science for Everyone},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 16th International Conference on Computer Supported Education - Volume 1: CSEDU},
year={2024},
pages={557-563},
publisher={SciTePress},
organization={INSTICC},
doi={10.5220/0012732800003693},
isbn={978-989-758-697-2},
}

in EndNote Style

TY - CONF

JO - Proceedings of the 16th International Conference on Computer Supported Education - Volume 1: CSEDU
TI - Enhancing Participation Through Inquiry Learning and Citizen Science: Science for Everyone
SN - 978-989-758-697-2
AU - Scanlon E.
AU - Herodotou C.
PY - 2024
SP - 557
EP - 563
DO - 10.5220/0012732800003693
PB - SciTePress