Community and Citizen Science Programs Support Environmental Education Outcomes

Key Findings

Researchers identified seven key findings from the review of environmentally focused community and citizen science programs. Two findings describe the breadth of the programs that were captured in the review: (1) programs cover a range of topics, participants, and places; (2) programs involve people in a wide range of scientific activities. Five findings describe the outcomes that were attributed to participation in the programs: (3) science content knowledge; (4) science inquiry skills and understanding the nature of science; (5) positive attitudes about science, the local place, and the environment; (6) community connectedness and cooperation; and (7) efficacy, identity, environmental behavior and stewardship.

Executive Summary

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From Anecdotes to Evidence: Diving into the Research Review Process

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What is the impact of environmental education (EE)? What outcomes are important in the field? What do EE programs strive to attain, with which audiences, and in what settings? What existing evidence documents effective approaches related to the range of desired EE outcomes?

Questions like these motivated NAAEE and colleagues, including an expert Advisory Board, to develop eeWORKS, an initiative to coalesce existing research within the field through a series of systematic literature reviews.

The eeWORKS team at NAAEE, along with researchers at collaborating universities, focuses on a three-part process to:

1. Identify relevant outcome areas and themes of interest.
2. Conduct research reviews.
3. Communicate and share. 

About the Research and Articles

A research team at the University of California, Davis analyzed 100 articles in the peer-reviewed literature that evaluated community and citizen science (CCS) programs and determined that these programs achieve a variety of environmental education outcomes. After selecting papers that met their criteria from a pool of 1639, the team read and coded each paper for participant impacts. These outcomes include gains in knowledge, positive environmental attitudes, and skills in data analysis and problem solving. Some of the programs also increased social connectedness by engaging communities in discussions of local problems. Other programs increased trust in science, enabled people to see themselves as people who use science to solve problems, and increased their environmental and stewardship behaviors. For more details on the key findings, please see Executive Summary and Key Findings.

The team explored the literature across a spectrum of programs anchored on one end by traditional scientist-led public data collection programs that may have large numbers of participants, such as the Christmas Bird Count,2 or a few highly trained participants, such as LakeWatch. While the majority of programs used adult volunteers, some were designed for classrooms (primarily middle and high schools), such as GLOBE. At the other end of the spectrum were co-created projects that engage community members in defining the problem and research question as well as ways to engage people in collecting, analyzing, and reporting the data. Some of these community science programs involve focus groups and mapping projects that engage people in providing information or collecting it from their neighbors in an effort to build momentum to create social change.

View articles included in review