Motivating and engaging high school students in citizen science projects

Citizen science (CS) in education programs at high schools has the aim to engage youth in research with a hands-on, active learning process. Therefore, the SDU Citizen Science Center has participated as a practitioner in several CS projects within social sciences, natural science and humanities that engage Danish high school students as citizen scientists as part of their education.

In “Climate Future Fiction” the students contribute to research on young people’s concerns regarding climate change in the far-future by writing and analyzing Cli-fi stories in their English classes. In “Our History” the students participate as citizen scientists by interviewing elderly people about their experiences of the societal changes in Denmark in the 1960s and 1970s, thereby creating data for the researchers as part of their history lessons. “A Healthier Southern Denmark” is a project and competition with five researchers from the region hospitals, in parallel a “High School Panel” is established. As part of their social science lessons, the students are in dialogue with the researchers on how to disseminate research to citizens.
Some 74 Danish high school classes have participated in these projects since 2019. Experiences from these CS projects are the focus of this poster:

• A model on how to engage high school students in CS.
• The perspective of engaging the students in CS

In co-creation with high school teachers and researchers, we have developed a semi-generic model for implementing CS in high school education. The model includes a masterclass for the teachers, co-creation of curriculum-based learning materials, dialogue between the researchers and the high school students and a competition element for the students with feedback from the researchers. Evaluations and follow-up research shows that the participating students increase their scientific knowledge, hopefully, this will change their attitudes towards science in the long run.