- Kwame Owusu-Daaku
- https://uwf.edu/hmcse/departments/earth-and-environmental-sciences/our-faculty/faculty-profiles/dr-kwame-owusu-daaku.html
- Assistant Professor
- Educating STEM Majors to Teach in High-Need Schools
- https://uwf.edu/ceps/departments/teacher-education-and-educational-leadership/uwf-teach/
- University of West Florida
- Melissa Demetrikopoulos
- https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/myncbi/1Piu8IFNGNSk5/bibliography/40979939/public/?sort=date&direction=descending
- Chair; External Evaluator for Noyce and ITEST projects
- Educating STEM Majors to Teach in High-Need Schools
- https://uwf.edu/ceps/departments/teacher-education-and-educational-leadership/uwf-teach/
- Institution for Biomedical Philosphy
- John Pecore
- https://uwf.edu/ceps/departments/teacher-education-and-educational-leadership/our-faculty/faculty-profiles/dr-john-pecore.html
- Professor
- Educating STEM Majors to Teach in High-Need Schools
- https://uwf.edu/ceps/departments/teacher-education-and-educational-leadership/uwf-teach/
- University of West Florida
Public Discussion
Continue the discussion of this presentation on the Multiplex. Go to Multiplex
Mary Nyaema
Great to see the impact of citizen science in preparing students to handle real-life challenges.
Janelle Johnson
Melissa Demetrikopoulos
Chair; External Evaluator for Noyce and ITEST projects
Thanks for your interest Mary.
Kwame Owusu-Daaku
Assistant Professor
Thanks Mary for watching the video. Long time no see ;)
Mary Nyaema
Kwame Owusu-Daaku
Assistant Professor
Hi All,
Thank you for your interest in our video. A few questions we have for you are:
Janelle Johnson
Meghan Marrero
I did involve some pre-service teachers in community science work a few years ago, and our study found that they continued to implement this work with their students, with excellent results. Community-based science is an excellent example of culturally relevant pedagogy, allowing students to engage in meaningful projects that are important to their local community.
Kwame Owusu-Daaku
Assistant Professor
Thanks for sharing your experience and the insight Meghan! Culturally relevant pedagogy is most definitely one of our goals with the citizen science programming in our pre-service teacher development.
Melissa Demetrikopoulos
Chair; External Evaluator for Noyce and ITEST projects
The first scholar has implemented this in their classroom now that they are an in-service teacher and we anticipate that the others will do the same so that we hope to have a similar outcome as you are reporting. I think that you are correct that the projects need to be related to something that is important locally so that the choice of the project is an important component to the success and the long-term implementation by the teachers.
Pat Friedrichsen
I enjoyed watching your video and seeing the impact of citizen science on Noyce scholars. Thanks for sharing!
Kwame Owusu-Daaku
Assistant Professor
Thanks Pat! I also enjoyed watching your video on using the COVID-19 pandemic to teach scientific literacy.
Barry Fishman
Professor
I love the Noyce program, and love what you are doing with it. A citizen science approach seems really valuable for building engagement among learners (and teachers!). I like that the video focuses in on one particular teacher and her mentor... can you comment on how the approach scales? Is the example you feature a story you might be able to tell for many students in your program?
Kwame Owusu-Daaku
Assistant Professor
Thanks Barry. Kara's story is most definitely a model for all the students in our program : minus winning grant funding to implement the project - although the opportunity to apply for such funding through our regional Noyce organization is available to all our graduates. We currently have 5 graduates from our program, and I know that at least three of them are implementing their citizen science projects in their classroom. To bring the program to scale more, this summer we are partnering these recent STEM Teaching graduates with our current scholars who are conducting their citizen science projects as sort of middle resource personnel between the University STEM faculty and the High School Teachers for our current scholars. Since our recent graduates have been in the shoes of these current scholars, our hope is that the recent graduates can help the current scholars navigate this dual mentoring experience better.
Barry Fishman
Professor
Wonderful - thank you for clarifying, Kwame!
Kwame Owusu-Daaku
Assistant Professor
No thank you Barry! Your question was so insightful! Much appreciated.
Margie Vela
Senior Program Manager
Citizen science is such an important and engaging way to bring science to the general public. It seems to me that this project helps create public awareness for coastal issues, and K-12 students are perfect for presenting real-world problems to local policy-makers and the public. Do you have any plans for students to present findings of their work to key stakeholders?
John Pecore
Professor
We typically engage in two or three different citizen science projects each year. For the Lionfish project, students presented their findings highlighting impacts from invasive Lionfish on popular commercial and sportfish, at school assemblies, regional science symposia, and public science festivals.
You may be interested in the publications for the Lionfish project.
https://biodiversitygenomics.net/site/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/iBOL-Barcode-Bulletin-Sept-2016.pdf
https://online.ucpress.edu/abt/article/81/3/169/91889/Invasive-Aliens-A-Student-Citizen-Science-Activity
Melissa Demetrikopoulos
Chair; External Evaluator for Noyce and ITEST projects
Hi Margie,
Thanks for your interest in our project. It is always helpful to use real-world problems to engage learners and this has become even more important with the challenges of virtual engagement.
Janelle Johnson
Brian Foley
Professor
The citizen science project is a great approach because you are finding the science phenomena that are directly relevant to students lives. With microplastics for example, the plastics are already impacting the local environment and it is something that students can start to address locally with recycling. Also as a Noyce director myself I love that you are engaging the preservice teachers in this together with scientists and inservice teachers. That is a great experience for them.
Are you planning to publish any of the lessons that the students create? There would probably be a lot of interest in them.
Janelle Johnson
Kwame Owusu-Daaku
Assistant Professor
Hi Brian! Thank you for your kind comments! Our team has floated the idea of publishing the lesson plans on and off but now that you mention there would be interest, we would certainly make that more of a priority! We have published previous lesson plans in the past such as on our Lionfish project which our PI John Pecore provided some links to in an earlier post.
April Bartnick
Engaging students in science in high-needs schools with citizen science is such a great project. Researching microplastics is so ambitious because it's such a huge problem. What kind of data are you collecting on the microplastics? Also, do you record microplastic data on an online platform?
Kwame Owusu-Daaku
Assistant Professor
April, thanks so much for you feedback! For microplastics, the project focused on counting microfibers, microbeads, and microfragments found in either water samples or seafood tissue. I know that Kara's lesson plan focused specifically in microplastics in water samples. As far as I know, the data is not currently recorded on an online platform. Some teaching resources that the science faculty mentor (Alexis Janosik) had developed that informed Kara's lesson planning are as follows:
https://polar-ice.org/polar-data-stories/educat...
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1U-T8BmTGUUL_5_...
https://polar-ice.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/0...
April Bartnick
April Bartnick
Thanks for the resources!
Pendred Noyce
The idea of having Noyce Scholars develop citizen science based curriculum with their cooperating teachers seems brilliant. An opportunity for STEM undergraduates to get involved in sharing citizen science with summer programs might be a productive way to lure more underrepresented minority students into considering teaching.
On the topic of microplastics, you might be interested in checking out this book, Microplastics and Me, written by a middle school student and science fair winner, Anna Du. (Disclosure: Tumblehome Books, which I lead, is the publisher.)
https://tumblehomebooks.org/book/microplastics-...
Kwame Owusu-Daaku
Assistant Professor
Pendred, thanks so much for your feedback and honored to have you view our video. Also the book looks like a great resource for teaching about or inspiring students to address microplastics!
Emmanuel Nti-Asante
This is an excellent Program. I am happy to be a part of the citizen mathematics aspect of this project. Kudos!
Deborah Upton
Curious as to what the "citizen mathematics aspects" of the project area?
Melissa Demetrikopoulos
Chair; External Evaluator for Noyce and ITEST projects
Hi Deborah,
Kwame can better answer this questions, but I thought I would give it a go since we are just about out of time to comment. In addition to Citizen Science projects, this program also has Citizen Mathematics projects. It is my understanding that the mathematics projects focus more closely on the data analysis aspects and/or larger data sets rather than on the collection of Scientific Data. Obviously data analysis and/or data illustrations are likely aspects of all Citizen Science projects as well. I believe that last year they did a project on mapping the risk of power outages from hurricanes.