Evaluation of outcomes for individual participants

Many citizen science projects aim to impact the individual citizens involved.

Please take a look at the following video to see how individual citizens might be impacted by their active involvement in a scientific project (here is the link to the video-transcript).

A large proportion of citizen science projects still does not evaluate the outcomes for individual participants. Amongst those who investigate the projects’ impact on individual citizens, the most common outcome documented so far is the one of gaining new knowledge. We find two different areas of knowledge gains:

• Knowledge on the subject under investigation: e.g. in a project related to climate change, participants can gain new knowledge on the origins of climate change, the consequences, and how to fight against it.

• Scientific inquiry skills and knowledge on the research process: participants can for instance learn how to set up a scientific inquiry process, how to collect data, guarantee the data quality, share scientific results.

In addition to knowledge gains we can find more transformative effects of learning:

• changing attitudes towards a specific topic, e.g., towards more environmentally sustainable resource management;

• active promotion of a certain topic amongst one's own social network, e.g. convincing others to protect their environment;

• changing behaviours, like taking more care for one's own environment, changing daily routines to avoid pollution etc.increasing

•  self-efficacy perceptions which indicate that a person thinks he/she is capable of actively contributing to science or protecting the environment

The following figure presents an overview of learning outcomes from citizens' participation in environmental citizen science projects:
Although this work focuses on environmental citizen science projects, some of the outcomes, such as interest, content knowledge, self-efficacy, motivation, behaviour change, might be interesting for projects from other areas as well. There are also impact scales that were developed in order to measure changes on each of these 6 dimensions. They can be downloaded here: https://cornell.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_cGxLGl1AlyAD8FL

Taken from: Framework for Articulating and Measuring Individual Learning Outcomes from Participation in Citizen Science. (taken from Phillips, T., Porticella, N., Constas, M. and Bonney, R., 2018. A Framework for Articulating and Measuring Individual Learning Outcomes from Participation in Citizen Science. Citizen Science: Theory and Practice, 3(2), p.3. DOI: http://doi.org/10.5334/cstp.126)