Enhancing Participation Through Inquiry Learning and Citizen

Science: Science for Everyone

Eileen Scanlon

and Christothea Herodotou

Institute of Educational Technology, Open University, Walton Hall, Milton Keynes, U.K.

Keywords: Informal Learning, Participation.

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.

1 INTRODUCTION

We are interested in the development of science

understanding and appreciation for the public. In

contemporary society we need this understanding and

appreciation for the public to become meaningfully

involved in democratic decision making on issues of

importance.

Often, we assume that the development of science

understanding starts and is informed most of all by

our formal instruction in science taking place in

educational establishments. Those who thrive in such

settings can potentially become professional

scientists or find employment in jobs where knowing

science is a prerequisite. But for many people, over a

lifetime, their involvement in science continues by

more informal means such as watching television

programmes, reading popular science books, or

becoming involved in amateur science clubs.

So, the science we learn in formal settings is only

one part of the way we become interested and

potentially involved and knowledgeable about science.

https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1180-682X

https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0980-1632

This paper describes work investigating the

relationship between methods used to learn science at

school and the development of our understanding of

science through our appreciation and involvement in

informal science activities. In particular, we have

been working on citizen science to assess its potential

to add particular informal learning opportunities to

other more formal ways of learning science. The

approach we have developed which informs all our

work in this area is citizen inquiry. This is best

summarized in this quote:

The term ‘citizen inquiry’ was coined to describe

ways that members of the public can learn by

initiating or joining shared inquiry-led scientific

investigations (Sharples et al., 2013). It merges

learning through scientific investigation with mass

collaborative participation exemplified in citizen

science activities, altering the relationship most

people have with research from being passive

recipients to becoming actively engaged’ (Herodotou,

Sharples and Scanlon, 2017, p 1).

Scanlon, E. and Herodotou, C.

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

DOI: 10.5220/0012732800003693

Paper published under CC license (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)

In Proceedings of the 16th International Conference on Computer Supported Education (CSEDU 2024) - Volume 1, pages 557-563

ISBN: 978-989-758-697-2; ISSN: 2184-5026

557

In this paper we describe how our work in citizen

science, inquiry learning and the development of

software to support participation has progressed over

the past fifteen years.

2 CITIZEN SCIENCE

Acquisition of science knowledge is one part of the

potential benefit for volunteers engaging in citizen

science projects. By surveying participants in

Zooniverse, one of the oldest online citizen science

platforms, Masters et al. (2016) have established that

volunteers are often picking up knowledge about

science concepts depending on whether or not there

was additional instructional material provided to

them. They write:

‘more actively engaged participants perform

better in a project-specific science knowledge quiz,

even after controlling for their general science

knowledge’ (Masters et al., 2016, p. 1).

However, Masters et al. and others have also

described potential benefits from learning about the

processes of science and have evidence that some

citizen scientists believe they are learning also about

the processes of science. Having been involved with

other citizen science projects such as iSpot

(Silvertown et al., 2014, Scanlon et al., 2014) and

iNaturalist (Herodotou et al., 2023), we have

developed an approach to the multifaceted ways in

which we need to approach the evaluation of learning

in citizen science projects.

We made attempts to investigate learning from

involvement in using these platforms through the

extraction of log files (such as number of projects

joined, duration a volunteer is connected to the

platform) both by reviewing the impact of

involvement with the platforms and on the views of

participants on what they have learned. An example

of what can be learned by these mixed method

approaches is given in Silvertown et al. (2014)

writing about learning from iSpot.

‘While we have anecdotal evidence from

comments made by participants that they have

learned, we do not have direct, quantitative evidence

of learning in iSpot yet. However, we do know from a

previous analysis of 400 participants’ behaviour that

they provided determinations for fewer than 40% of

their very first observations, but that they themselves

determined more than 60% of their 50th

observations’ (Scanlon et al., 2014, p142).

Our route into further work on promoting,

developing, and evaluating involvement in citizen

science occurred after a period of intensive work on

the topic of supporting inquiry learning in formal

settings. We will describe in the next section our

attempts to develop inquiry learning approaches and

more active participation in citizen science. Our

approach has been developed by involvement in a

number of funded projects over the last fifteen years.

These are summarised in Table 1.

Table 1: Funding for projects developing our approach.

Year

Funder

Project Title

2008-12

ESRC/TELTRP

Personal Inquiry

2012-13

Wolfson

Open Science Lab

2013-15

Nominet

Young People’s

citizen science

2017-21

National

Science

Foundation

Learn CitSci

2020-21

Mental

Health

Scotland

Democratising

research: a mental

health pilot

2020-21

BBSRC

EDU Cit Sci

2022-25

Horizon

Extending Design

Thinking Through

Digital

Technologies

Our initial funding for work in schools for personal

inquiry, led to investigations of inquiry learning in the

Open Science Lab funded by Wolfson. This was

further developed with students in a University

technical college supported by Nominet. We

developed our approach to evaluation of citizen

science further during work with the National Science

Foundation project, while experimenting with social

missions funded partly by Mental Health Scotland.

BBSRC provided support for development of a citizen

science community, while funding from the EU is

allowing us to test other features in a school setting.

3 INQUIRY LEARNING

We started this work in 2009 back at a time where

ultramobile computing devices had first come into

British schools and teachers were trying to work out

what to do with them, particularly the possibilities

CSEDU 2024 - 16th International Conference on Computer Supported Education

558

they offered of helping students work on projects that

connected work in school and home and other settings

in which they learn science. We received funding for

a joint research councils funded project Personal

Inquiry- Personal Inquiry (PI): Designing for

Evidence-Based Inquiry Learning across Formal and

Informal Settings, a research project funded in the

first round of the ESRC/EPSRC Technology

enhanced learning Programme. The aim of the project

was to help children to develop scientific

understanding using technology enhanced learning to

support mobile and contextual learning. The project

worked closely with a range of stakeholders including

schools, discovery centres, and museums. In addition

to hardware support, we realised that to develop the

kind of software necessary to support the process of

inquiry we had to instantiate it in a way that made

sense both to teachers and to software developers, so

we constructed a simple representation of the inquiry

process (Scanlon et al., 2012). The new personalised

learning approach we developed was important in the

success of the project.

The reason we identified personal inquiry as a key

theme for our work was because we were trying, as

well as looking at the technological possibilities to

support inquiry, to find ways of increasing motivation

for students, around work particularly associated with

the science curriculum. We thought there were three

ways in which we could make school inquiries more

personal. One was by focusing on oneself (Myself),

one by focusing on work related to the community

(My community) and one focusing on the local

environment (My environment).

The project was successful, and this was

demonstrated in the studies conducted in schools

which indicate that the personal inquiry toolkit was

successfully adopted in schools teaching science and

geography by teachers and by pupils (aged 11 to 14).

We worked in formal teacher directed lessons where

students’ work in classrooms was connected to field

trips and homework sessions. We also worked in after

school clubs. In this way we were able to establish

that the toolkit ‘effectively supported the transition

between individual, group, and whole-class activities

and supported learning across formal and informal

settings’. (Sharples et al., 2016, p. 309).

Towards the end of the project, we found ourselves

working more with students outside the confines of the

curriculum, outside the stated goals of their classroom

work, working in after school clubs and in this context

found that the software developed was still useful to

support students. As a consequence, we decided to

explore the potential for using and further developing

this software support for informal settings.

3.1 Potential of Inquiry Learning

Outside Formal Education

We received the next funding support to help us look

at the potential for taking this approach to personal

collaborative inquiry learning for schoolchildren in

formal settings and broaden it to other members of the

public in informal settings. In studies funded by

Nominet (Herodotou et al. 2014, Sharples et al., 2017),

we explored this which led to the public launch of a

newly developed version of the software nQuire.

(https://iet.open.ac.uk/projects/nquire-young-citizen-

inquiry). Initial findings from the Nominet funded

project and work from a PhD student (Aristeidou et al.,

2017) on the exploration of methods for developing

communities researching a topic of interest to them.

These led us to conclude that there was potential for a

fully functional platform to support work in citizen

science, extending our approach. With financial

support from the OU/BBC partnership (see below), a

new version of nQuire was designed and launched

(www.nquire.org.uk) that effectively supports

community and citizen science activities.

Figure 1: The nQuire home page.

Volunteers can either take part in citizen science

projects others created or design, pilot and manage

their own citizen science activities. nQuire has been

designed to the highest ethical and data protection

standards and is free to use by the public (Herodotou

et al., 2021). To enable design of high-quality studies,

an authoring functionality for designing citizen

science studies is in place. This is accompanied by a

process of data quality review by experts.

3.2 Some Citizen Science Projects (or

‘Missions’) with nQuire

To give a brief summary of projects that we have done

since our pivot towards citizen science we give a few

examples. We have made the software available to

anybody who wanted it, with our support, and we did

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

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a few small scale inquiries, including one with the

University of Wolverhampton where we were

interested in views about novels, another Open

University one on sleep chronotypes, one on

observations of starling murmuration and another

about the growth of trees. These were led by

ourselves, and by others including Universities and

Charities. While smaller scale than later inquiries

these inquiries could become extended in time e.g.,

nQuire was used in capturing people's preferences of

novels in a series of inquiries.

The platform is available to anyone to run their

investigations. This includes members of our

university, members of other Universities, other

organisations or individuals wanting to research areas

of personal interest.

After a few years of operation on a relatively

small scale we attracted the attention of those who

had worked on the development of Lab UK studies.

These had been large scale studies where the BBC

had partnered with scientists to collect data from the

public on a range of topics related to broadcasts. After

some conversations about the functionally of the

platform we were approached by the BBC/OU

partnership to consider whether the platform could

work for investigations at large scale, the scale we

might expect by connection with broadcasts. Up to

this point the typical group of learners or citizen

scientists that we had on an inquiry was around 200

participants, sometimes up to a thousand. In our

partnership with the BBC/OU, we needed to plan an

extension of the platform so that it could cope with

hundreds of thousands of participants. The first

example of this was the use of this new version of

nQuire (named Tomorrow's world nQuire) to be

deployed for future large-scale inquiries or

‘missions’. We partnered with the British Trust for

Ornithology to develop a set of inquiries as part of the

BBC Gardenwatch campaign in 2019. The

Gardenwatch investigation (or “mission”) was

Open University and promoted by the BBC

Springwatch TV series. The purpose was to

understand “who” lives in UK gardens by asking

citizens to report on mammals, worms, and birds they

observe in their gardens. More than 230,000

contributions were collected. Findings provided

recommendations as to what people should be doing

to support biodiversity in their gardens, for example,

providing boxes and food to specific species. Another

broader purpose was as an opportunity to include

discussion of the inquiry in the TV programme and

support and promote a call to action. If the mission

allowed people to understand more about which

resources are most important for the survival of

species in gardens, this could encourage people to

take action which would support biodiversity having

found out more about how this all worked. For

example, they might be encouraged to do more to

support biodiversity in gardens by providing log

piles, leaving grass, and feeding hedgehogs or similar

approaches to using their gardens. nQuire currently

hosts investigations in fields such as biodiversity

mental health, literacy, and education.

Figure 2: What is nQuire.

Stein et al. (2023) have reviewed multi-project

citizen science platforms highlighting similarities and

differences, which is helpful to see the range of

options and functionalities.

The key difference with nQuire from other

platforms available is our focus on supporting a range

of different types of users and broadening the range

of benefits for them. We would distinguish nQuire

from other multi-project citizen science platforms as

it is distinctive in the following ways: it enables users

to define research questions, design a methodological

approach and collect data, allow for community

communications and commenting on data, integrated

data analysis and visualisation tools, are accessible

from a web browser and have supported authoring

tools. These users can be members of the public not

only scientists.

To summarise the ways in which our platform is

designed:

• Enables design and management of projects

through an authoring functionality.

• Data are securely stored in university servers.

• All citizen science studies have gained ethical

approvals before going live.

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• Data can be collected in a range of forms

including text, image, sensors.

• Data can be confidential or open to the public

to read, comment and like enabling peer

learning.

• Dynamic data visualisations give immediate

feedback to volunteers as to what emerging

findings look like at a given point of time.

• Data can be shown on a map.

• Data can be downloaded at any time.

• Interim and final reports can be shared with

participants.

We have conducted interviews and administered

questionnaires to users of the nQuire platform who

had chosen to participate in citizen science projects

(Herodotou et al., 2017). We have done some work to

understand what, whether and how people learn from

participating in some of these citizen science

inquiries. A questionnaire to 150 users of the platform

revealed that main motivations for taking part in a

mission were to contribute to scientific research, an

appreciation of the importance of helping with

research, their own personal interest, and curiosity

about the topic (Herodotou et al., 2017). These results

are both comforting and challenging. One challenge

is represented by comments from users such as the

desire for a number of activities to be completed

before there was a sense of a developed trajectory of

learning. (There are similarities here to the issue of

tracking learners in formal settings to identify a

trajectory of learning development). A view could be

taken about whether participation in the platform had

increased and individuals’ knowledge and confidence

and contributing to science and using scientific

results. However, many of our participants have a

limited participation on the platform, taking part in

only one set of missions. In this regard nQuire is

currently not as developed as platforms such as

Zooniverse where the number of potential activities

engaged in by participants is much larger. We do not

expect all participants or volunteers to have a desire

to create their own studies (and this is supported by

our survey results), but we do hope that for some keen

volunteers this will be a window to understanding and

accessing science in ways their skills and knowledge

are developed and citizen science activities are

supporting not only science but also their local

communities. We continue to explore the possibilities

of tracking the learning outcomes of people who

engage in our activities and extending our methods

beyond reliance on self-support.

5 DEMOCRATIC

PARTICIPATION IN CITIZEN

SCIENCE

We have designed 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

in any research field (Herodotou, Sharples, Scanlon,

2017). In this regard we are mindful of the principles

of citizen science outlined in this document by the

European Citizen Science Association (ECSA)

(https://osf.io/xpr2n/wiki/home/) and enthusiastic

about the idea of opening science to all including

those with no relevant qualifications or expertise.

We consider citizen science to be a means through

which people can educate themselves. It is potentially

a means to provide support for them in developing

life-long skills, in particular critical and scientific

thinking. These are much needed to understand and

cope with pressing socio-scientific issues. Offering

people opportunities to understand and engage with

science (broadly defined to include natural, physical,

and social science) in ways that are responsive to their

own needs, could develop trust in the outcomes of

research and help people make decisions in an

informed and evidence-based manner reducing, for

example, the risk of trusting misinformation.

Our ambition therefore in this work is to open the

knowledge production process to a wider group in

society using the citizen science inquiry method. That

is our ambition is to use this to increase the

knowledge of how science and research is done in the

general public so that people can understand how

science is produced and as a result build greater trust

in scientific outcomes and potentially be more aware

of contentious claims.

We are investigating how can this be achieved

through enabling people to design their own

investigations and to receive training as to how to

design a good scientific study in order to make a start

on democratising current scientific practices. This is

an ambitious project. Offering training to scientists on

how to engage with their participants in ways that

benefits result for the science, scientists and citizens

involved. We also see such work as potentially

helping to democratise current scientific practices by

offering training to scientists as to how to engage with

their participants in ways that benefit both the science

and citizens, and by designing tools that scaffold the

process of opening science to the public

(visualisations etc).

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

561

Like (Bela et al., 2016) we would like to make

progress in operationalising the transformative

aspirations of citizen inquiry to support the

development of scientific thinking skills in the

general population.

6 CONCLUSION AND FUTURE

PLANS

As a consequence of 15 years of development we

now have a pedagogically informed platform for

citizen science which allows us to consider learning

at scale. nQuire is our pedagogically informed citizen

science platform. It has been developed by The Open

University to support individuals and organisations

design, launch, and manage scalable research

projects. We can support large-scale online

investigations in any topic or discipline, and currently

we have recorded more than a quarter of a million

contributions to missions.

Individuals or organisations can use our authoring

environment to create scientifically robust and ethical

investigations. For scientists and others wishing to

use the platform there is an overhead associated with

authoring and taking the appropriate steps for ethical

approval. This is monitored by the nQuire team but so

far, the process is reasonably smooth.

To realise our ambitions, we will continue to

extend and develop the platform. So far, we have

developed appropriate tools to put in place to support

our ambition. We think that integrating activities with

our citizen inquiry missions will give us the

opportunity to further test this approach. We will

work to further understand the aspirations of our

users. As more inquiries or missions are developed

this will help us test out the proposition of what we

need to do to further democratise research.

However, our most recent funded work with the

nQuire platform is taking us back to the original

inspiration of this work, inquiry learning in schools.

nQuire is one of the emerging technologies being

explored to encourage and facilitate the development

of design thinking in schools. This design-based

research funded by the EU Horizon programme and

Innovate UK (Exten(DT)

, http://www.extendt2.eu).

This project involves us in working with eight

partners throughout Europe on exploratory case

studies with emerging technologies in schools. Our

contribution to the project is the development of a

version of nQuire, nQuire for students, that can be

used to develop students’ research skills in primary

and secondary schools.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Our thanks are due to our stakeholders, participants

and the funders listed in Table 1. We would like to

acknowledge also all the members of the nQuire team

over the years, especially our colleagues Mike

Sharples, Eloy Villasclaras-Fernandez, Paul

Mulholland. Maria Aristeidou, Kevin McLeod and

his team.

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