“Teaching science without allowing children to do real research is like teaching them to play football but never letting them play a match,” says Jo Foster.
“You have to know the rules to succeed at football, and you have to know the rules to succeed at science, but unless you play a match, you miss out on the excitement of scoring a championship-winning goal. The same goes for science: students need to have the opportunity to make real-life scientific discoveries.”
Foster is the director of the Institute for Research in Schools (IRIS), and she is absolutely convinced that “citizen science” - real-life research conducted by amateur scientists - can have enormous value in the classroom.
It can, she says, help children to see that science is a journey; that instead of learning about other people’s discoveries, they can make their own. That, in turn, engages pupils, builds science capital and, ultimately, encourages them into Stem (science, technology, engineering and maths) careers.
The premise of citizen science is all about allowing students to take the lead on real-life research, but what sort of investigations can they take on?
IRIS has a wealth of projects already mapped out, which schools can implement for free. And, in April, it published a framework, designed by teachers and school leaders, which brings together best practice and forms a toolkit to help schools evaluate and improve their Stem provision.
But will it work? While the framework is new, the impact of IRIS’ historical resources is clear: in a recent survey, 97 per cent of teachers involved in IRIS said students were more engaged and motivated by science after taking part, and 89 per cent of IRIS students surveyed said they want to study science at university.
Citizen science projects in your classroom
So, what do the projects look like in practice?
One is called Earth Observation, and it encourages students to use satellite data to investigate glaciological features, floods and fires, and then to contribute towards scientific efforts to understand the world’s changing landscapes.
As a class, or in small groups, students decide a question they want to investigate. A group of Year 10 students from Sterling High School in Scotland, for example, wanted to see if penguin colonies could be tracked using freely available satellite imagery. They found that, yes, they could, because when a certain filter was put on the imagery, it highlighted areas of penguin poo. Students then found a patch of penguin poo in what was thought to be an unhabituated area and contacted the British Antarctic Survey, who went to the area and confirmed that there was indeed a colony of penguins there, which were previously unknown.
That scientific journey, Foster says, will stay with those students forever: “Those students have really changed something, and I think the opportunity and possibility to do that is really exciting. You saw that they really felt what science is, that had that feeling of discovery.”
More teaching and learning:
Earth observation is just one of the projects offered by IRIS; there is another around reducing the carbon footprint of a school, for example, and one on cosmic mining. However, the projects are all currently tailored for secondary school students. So how can primary schools get involved?
Foster recommends another programme aimed at younger pupils, offered by The Royal Society -Tomorrow’s Climate Scientists. Unlike IRIS, which is accessible to all schools, this specific programme sees schools apply for grants of up to £3,000 to run investigative Stem projects in partnership with industry professionals.
Making room for investigations
Clearly, then, there are a lot of opportunities for schools to get involved in citizen science. But where does it fit into the timetable? Should these investigations take place within science lessons? Or stand alongside them in another block of time?
In most of the schools delivering the IRIS projects, they take place as after-school activities, says Foster - but so many are related to the curriculum that parts can be embedded throughout lessons.
“One of the most effective teaching strategies is setting learning in context for students. If you’re teaching the carbon cycle, for example, you could bring in our Carbon Researchers project,” she says. “Obviously, that’s dependent on curricular time, but what we know is that when kids are applying what they know, it sticks better, and they feel more engaged about it.”
The skills students gain are worth this extra investment of time, she stresses. As well as helping to develop soft skills such as collaboration, resilience and creativity, students also have the opportunity to hone their data collection and analytical skills.
“In science lessons, children do an experiment - for example, around reactivity - and are asked to pour A into B, and then write up the results. There’ll be someone in the class who doesn’t quite do it right and ends up with something different. The teacher may say, “OK, try again”. But, actually, we need to say, ‘Oh, that’s odd, isn’t it? Why do we think that happened?’ But too often, there’s just no space for that. And yet, that’s where students gain all these important skills,” she says.
“Science isn’t repeating someone else’s experiment. Children need that problem-solving element; they need real research.”
