Butterflies & wild bees: biology teachers’ PCK development through citizen science

Abstract

Citizen science is a rapidly growing emerging field in science and it is gaining importance in education. Therefore, this study was conducted to document the pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) of biology teachers who participated in a citizen science project involving observation of wild bees and identification of butterflies. In this paper, knowledge about how these biological methods can be taught to students is presented. After two years in the project, four teachers were interviewed and their PCK was captured in the form of content representations (CoRes) and Pedagogical and Professional-Experience Repertoires (PaP-eRs). These results can help future citizen science projects to link their activities to the school curriculum. But not only success can be reported: although one of the project team's aims was to make the Nature of Science accessible to the teachers and students in the course of the project, the teachers did not take this aspect into account. This paper discusses the possible reasons and proposes various strategies for improving citizen science in the context of school biology learning.

Citizen science and wildlife biology: Synergies and challenges

“…The greatest benefits of the engagement of students in the three studies lay in the interactions between educational and natural scientists and the local population, that is the heterogeneous network which was initiated by the schools, providing a large‐scale long‐term network for conducting CS, which also results in contributions to conference and manuscripts (e.g., Kelemen‐Finan et al., under review; Puehringer‐Sturmayr et al., ; Scheuch et al., ). Further, private gardens became accessible for scientists by involving the owners (and their children) as citizen scientists.…”

Citizen science improves our understanding of the impact of soil management on wild pollinator abundance in agroecosystems

“…Some of the successes of our project are due to identifying an appropriate target audience for involvement with the project, a thorough volunteer education process, simplicity of the survey protocol, and ease of data submission. These allowed us to not only sustain the project for 3 years, a longer duration than many other pollinator citizen science projects [23,49,50], but increase data collection in each project year. Pollinator citizen science projects with more complex, time consuming experiments tend to have problems retaining or increasing participant numbers [51], which was one of the reasons for keeping our protocols relatively simple.…”

Las mariposas como estrategia didáctica en el aprendizaje de la taxonomía básica y reconocimiento de la biodiversidad

“…A la vez, desde el punto de vista ecológico: los colores aposemáticos, la presencia de manchas ocelares y patrones de coloración de algunas especies permiten la enseñanza en campo del concepto de mimetismo como el batesiano, el anillo mulleriano y la coloración disruptiva que son estrategias de defensa para evitar la depredación (Valencia et al 2005). No obstante, se presenta dificultad en la incorporación de actividades de identificación de insectos en las aulas debido a la alta riqueza de especies que presentan muchos sitios de muestreo, las similitudes morfológicas entre especies distintas, es decir especies crípticas, o las variaciones dentro de una misma especie (Scheuch et al 2018).…”