Counting Birds

What does Bird Counting have to do with Academia, Science Education, or Teacher development?

It was Christmas Day, December 25th 1900, when the ornithologist Frank M Chapman took hold of the bourgeoning Conservation movement in North America.  Instead of hunting birds as part of normal holiday traditions, that year Chapman decided to count them instead.  The Christmas Bird Count or CBC had humble beginnings, starting with 27 dedicated birders, but today has evolved into tens of thousands of volunteers all across North America every year. This annual census of bird species has directly contributed to conservation efforts led by the Environmental Protection Agency and Climate Change reporting.

The Christmas Bird Count is one of the earliest examples of Citizen Science - a template of large-scale scientific participation involving members of the general public that is gaining traction across all areas of science. Today let’s walk through how teachers can use citizen science to promote active-inquiry-based learning.

What is Citizen Science?

At its core citizen science has three basic ingredients -  scalability, authenticity, and communicability.  Projects that rely on a large number of people for success is not a bug, but a feature of citizen science, and often the pool of participants extends into the general public.  This brings with it varying levels of scientific knowledge and training, but what the participants do still has to be authentic research with the potential to discover novel outcomes.  Innovation is the driving force for participant recruitment, and so there needs to be a “hook” - why should people care about this project, and how does it impact their everyday lives?  This of course relates to the “communicability” of the project, and how easy it can cut through the noise.  Seeing as citizen science projects cannot happen without the citizen participants, researchers have to communicate the findings back to the broader general public as well.

Relinquishing Control

In our field of molecular biosciences, authentic research revolves around the laboratory, where each experiment uses expensive reagents, complex equipment, and interconnected multi-step protocols. We can’t expect non-scientists to start contributing straight away, there needs to be support mechanisms in place to slowly ramp up the complexity. One evidence-based way of doing this is broadly termed inquiry-based learning, where students are challenged with open-ended questions in laboratory classes, the answers to which are unknown to them. These questions may not be innovative or of interest to a broader audience, but students will need to use problem-solving skills as a central part of their learning. Inquiry-based learning can take place across a continuum of student responsibility, ranging from verifying the results of famous experiments by following a recipe-style protocol ala a cookbook, all the way to an immersive apprenticeship-style research experience.

Adaptation over Re-invention

That’s all good in theory, but how does it work in practice and become a citizen science project?

The first step is to convert one of your existing lab classes into an inquiry-driven format. Instead of prescribing students specific questions to answer, why not give them a choice? Pick one out of three research questions that can be answered over a series of lab classes, and ask students to make a prediction or hypothesis at the outset before diving in.

How will they test their hypotheses?  

Students can be given standard operating protocols though, and it’s up to them to choose which technique will work best.  Each experiment has pros and cons, and the learning happens when students have to cognitively process which is better suited for their experiment.  It’s up to them to figure this out.  What if your teaching labs are only setup to do a small number of techniques in a limited amount of space?  It’s perfectly fine to focus on one experimental technique, and bring in inquiry-elements through optimizing the protocol.  What concentrations of chemicals should they use for each step – can they perform a serial dilution to figure this out?  Optimising and adapting existing protocols is a huge part of science, and there’s no reason why it can’t be a bigger part of science education.

Scaling up

Every teacher wants smaller class sizes to better connect and relate to each student, but in Australian universities we’re often dealing with hundreds of students in each class.  It’s a challenging environment, but citizen science is uniquely positioned to take advantage of this.  Instead of a broad callout to the general public, you can simply pitch to project to your own students and still have a big sample size.

Using my microbiology class as the example, we were able to crowd-source student volunteers (up to 400 students per semester) to determine the microbial variability across human populations – the Human Microbiome Project. We’ve all seen ads that claim the latest super-food is full of only “good” bacteria, but what bacteria counts as good or bad is actually a pretty open question in the field.  Students swabbed their own oral cavities, and were given access to a suite of personalised diagnostic tests to identify the microbial composition within their mouths.  The human microbiome has correlations to chronic diseases such as asthma, diabetes, and cancer, and students contributed their de-identified biometric data towards the research of novel therapies. My teaching team was actually one of the first in the field to provide thousands of students with personalised next-generation DNA sequencing technology to characterise their own microbiomes, and we published our findings in a Microbiology Education journal.  

Spreading the message

The findings from Citizen Science projects need to be communicated back to the general public, but it doesn’t have to be in the form a peer-reviewed journal article. It can be more immediate in the form of blogs, podcasts, or videos, and you can even make this part of students’ assessment.  For example I ask my students to form pairs and record a podcast discussing the findings of the microbiome project to the general public. Communication works best if the medium is tailored to the target audience – we’ve talked about this in a previous video, and online content is how most people find out about everything these days, including science.  It’s very tricky do this well, and we’ve had to adapt the marking criteria for the podcast assignment over the years to focus on lack of jargon and use of metaphors or analogies – it’s been a really fun process figuring this out!

We talk through a few different examples of Citizen Science in the video below. How can you adapt Citizen Science or Inquiry-based learning into your teaching?

Jack.