Educational backgrounds, project design and inquiry learning in citizen science

This chapter outlines some of the notions of inquiry-based learning and their relationship to the practices of scientific method. It explores some of the existing research on the relationship between educational background and learning outcomes in citizen science. The chapter provides background information on the study undertaken and the two citizen science projects the author's surveyed, and presents relevant data from the analysis of the survey, which has allowed them to explore some of the complex relationships between participant attributes, citizen science project design and inquiry learning outcomes. Inquiry-based learning is one of a number of overlapping pedagogical framings that have been developed in response to what are considered the limitations of more instruction-based transmission approaches of memorisation, recall and rote learning in science education. Citizen science projects take many different forms, using different types of engagement and encouraging the participation of different groups. Some are more local, and some, increasingly mediated by computer technologies, are more global.