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In STEM learning focused on science literacy, socioscientific issues instruction is often proposed as a way to bolster students’ civic engagement, however few studies in science education have explicitly examined this connection. We define civic engagement as the work of influencing legitimately public matters using means within the existing political structure. In this work we investigate students’ feelings of self-efficacy for this type of civic engagement in the context of four socioscientific issues (prairie dog conservation, food insecurity, biofuels and water conservation). This study was in the context of a large enrollment introductory science college course, where students used a structured decision-making process to examine alternative policy solutions to complex socioscientific issues. We qualitatively examined students’ response about their perception of the importance of the issue, their self-efficacy in exploring actions they could take to impact the issue, and the effectiveness of those actions. We found that students’ ideas about impact and effectiveness varied across the four different issues contexts due to students’ sense of the issues’ importance and scale. Generally, students’ ideas about actions they could take to impact the issue were narrow and rarely included political actions like voting. We also found post instruction increases in students’ civic engagement attitudes and skills related to social justice, interpersonal and problem-solving skills and political awareness. Finally, we suggest that socioscientific instruction must have an explicit connection to policy-level decisions and reveal how individual actions can influence the societal system. Our course using a structured decision-making process in the context of socioscientific issues is one model to help students make these connections.

Citizen science has extensively been reported as a useful tool for scientists gathering large quantities of information (Silvertown et al. 2011; Dickinson et al. 2010; Bonney et al. 2009). Citizen Science has been broadly defined in previous literature. We employ the following for purposes of this paper: partnerships between scientists and the public where data are collected, shared, and analyzed (Jordan et al. 2012). These partnerships result in projects that range in participation capacity, participation design, and project goals. On one hand, there are participatory action research projects (Cooper et al. 2007), initially defined by Caren Cooper as projects initiated by non-scientist members of the public and developed hand-in-hand with scientists or scientists hired by the project as consultants (see also Shirk et al. 2012). On the other hand there are crowdsourced or contributory citizen science projects (Bonney et al. 2009), which allow researchers to gather large amounts of data without any input or participation of the public on project development. These large contributory projects such as eBird (www.eBird.org) and Evolution MegaLab have had success in collecting large-scale data sets from participants for long-term trend analysis in the U.S. and Europe respectively. Crowdsourcing citizen science projects such as FoldIt (www.fold.it) and Galaxy Zoo (www.galaxyzoo.org), have capitalized on large numbers of participants to do analysis that computers are not adept at. Co-created action type citizen science projects represent the middle ground, where partnerships between local citizens and scientists have been successful in preservation and restoration efforts of local waterways in New Jersey and Pennsylvania (e.g., ReClam the Bay (www.reclamthebay.org) and Shermans Creek Conservation (www.shermanscreek.org)). Regardless of the project type, all citizen science programs have participants engaged in authentic scientific research and resulted in successful data collection for scientists. While there is no official count of all the citizen science projects active at any given time, anecdotally there are a large number citizen science projects in ecology. Recent findings on patterns and use of citizen science in research found that the bulk of published citizen science based research was ecological/biological in nature (Follett and Strezov 2015). What has been little studied is the role and impact of the professional scientist who is engaging the citizen scientists. Two areas are of particular interest in this research: (1) who and what disciplines use citizen science and (2) the perceived trust and reliability of citizen science gathered data in academia. Research about the ecologists, and scientists writ-large, engaging participants in their research is limited. It is important to know more about the role and use of citizen science in academia because of its increased use in certain fields not just as a research tool but a method of engagement, and engendering broader support for science within the public sphere. If there is indeed a skewed representation of particular disciplines or individuals, there may be implications for broader citizen science outcomes. Additionally, variation in trust and use, or willingness to use, citizen science or citizen science collected data because of academic practice or identity frames may hinder further gains made in the field of citizen science as * Amanda E. Sorensen amasoren@rutgers.edu

The cichlid fishes of Lake Malawi are an excellent model group with which to study adaptive radiation and speciation; due to the vast number of individual species, large variation in feeding adaptations and behaviours, and relatively recent divergence are found. Males of many cichlid species will obtain and defend lek-like territories, where they court potential mates in addition to foraging for food. Aspects of territory quality warrant investigation because of the relationship between reproductive success and territory defence success. In this study, we tested whether the presence of a small or large food resource had any effect on the preference of a gravid female for a potential mate. The results of this experiment suggest that the presence of a large food resource increases the attractiveness of a male to a potential mate. This may suggest that the presence of food alone may not be the most important factor, or there may be a threshold amount over which females are attracted. These results indicate that certain aspects of territory quality such as habitat type or proximity to a food resource may play a role in both intersexual and intrasexual selection mechanisms: perhaps even driving and possibly accelerating the speciation of certain lineages of cichlid fishes. Resume Les cichlides du lac Malawi constituent un excellent modele de groupe pour etudier la radiation adaptative et la speciation, en raison du grand nombre d'especes, de la grande variete des adaptations et des comportements alimentaires, et de divergences relativement recentes. Les mâles de nombreuses especes de cichlides acquierent et defendent un territoire comparable a un lek, ou ils font la cour a d'eventuels partenaires et aussi cherchent a s'alimenter. Certains aspects de la qualite d'un territoire justifient les recherches en raison de la relation entre le succes de la reproduction et celui de la defense du territoire. Dans cette etude, nous avons voulu verifier si la presence d'une source de nourriture plus ou moins importante a un effet quelconque sur la preference d'une femelle gravide pour un partenaire potentiel. Les resultats de cette experience suggerent que la presence d'une importante source de nourriture augmente l'attractivite d'un mâle pour une partenaire potentielle. Cela peut suggerer que la presence de nourriture seule peut ne pas etre le facteur le plus important ou qu'il peut exister un seuil a partir duquel les femelles sont attirees. Nos resultats indiquent que certains aspects de la qualite d'un territoire, tels que le type d'habitat ou la proximite d'une source de nourriture, peuvent jouer un role dans les mecanismes de selection aussi bien inter- qu'intrasexuels et qu'ils favorisent ou accelerent peut-etre meme la speciation de certaines lignees de cichlides.

The American public’s environmental, scientific, and civic literacies are generally low. While environmental science courses often recognize the human dimensions of environmental problems and solutions, they typically treat such phenomena as matters of opinion and rarely engage with social scientific ways of knowing. Recently, there has been a push in higher education to advance broader scientific literacy, but little attention has been paid to helping students gain an understanding of how socio-scientific evidence and claims are generated. Our work here aims to develop the knowledge framework that facilitates the integration of knowledge across biophysical and social science domains. In this research brief, we report on a project in which an interdisciplinary team developed a model of climate adaptation and mitigation to help teach undergraduates about the coupled human-climate system. The research team found this process to be integral to both thinking and learning about a system with biophysical and social variables. This project is unique in that we then used this model to develop not just curricula but also a framework that can be used to guide and assess interdisciplinary instruction at the collegiate level. This framework allows learners to make sense of complex socio-environmental issues and reason with scientific information from the social and biophysical sciences.

In west Baltimore, Maryland, USA, disinvestment in housing and infrastructure has left an ecological legacy of mosquito infestation, along with many other social and environmental hazards. Ecological sampling techniques and resident narratives together tell a rich story about how racist housing and planning policies led to landscapes dominated by abandoned buildings, vacant lots, and sanitation problems, which in turn sustain invasive Aedes albopictus mosquitoes that bite and can transmit disease. However, the study’s focus on the seemingly narrow topic of mosquito control presented challenges for resident engagement and participation in a neighborhood troubled by broader issues of environmental and social injustice.

In response to recent educational imperatives in the United States, modeling and systems thinking have been identified as being critical for science learning. In this paper, we investigate models in the classroom from two important perspectives: (1) from the teacher perspective to understand how teachers perceive models and use models in the classroom and (2) from the students perspective to understand how student use model-based reasoning to represent their understanding in a classroom setting. Qualitative data collected from 19 teachers who attended a professional development workshop in the northeastern United States indicate that while teachers see the value in teaching to think with models (i.e., during inquiry practices), they tend to use models mostly as communication tools in the classroom. Quantitative data collected about the modeling practices of 42 middle school students who worked collaboratively in small groups (4–5 students) using a computer modeling program indicated that students tended to engage in more mechanistic and function-related thinking with time as they reasoned about a complex system. Furthermore, students had a typified trajectory of first adding and then next paring down ideas in their models. Implications for science education are discussed.

Citizen science programs pose excellent opportunities for science learning through volunteer engagement in authentic science projects, often with scientists. In this article, we share data on whether the development, discussion, and revision of models resulted in an improved description of scientific practices. We engaged individuals in a collaborative citizen science project where individuals use online resources to pose locally based research questions and use modeling practices to design research. These individuals also gathered data to support or refute their models. Project leaders were interviewed before and after project participation to determine the extent to which ideas about scientific practices have changed. We found that these individuals developed a greater capacity to independently ask and answer questions related to successful research design.

Course-based undergraduate research experiences (CUREs) have been developed to overcome barriers including students in research. However, there are few examples of CUREs that take place in a conservation and natural resource context with students engaging in field research. Here, we highlight the development of a conservation-focused CURE integrated to a research program, research benefits, student self-assessment of learning, and perception of the CURE. With the additional data, researchers were able to refine species distribution models and facilitate management decisions. Most students reported gains in their scientific skills, felt they had engaged in meaningful, real-world research. In student reflections on how this experience helped clarify their professional intentions, many reported being more likely to enroll in graduate programs and seek employment related to science. Also interesting was all students reported being more likely to talk with friends, family, or the public about wildlife conservation issues after participating, indicating that courses like this can have effects beyond the classroom, empowering students to be advocates and translators of science. Field-based, conservation-focused CUREs can create meaningful conservation and natural resource experiences with authentic scientific teaching practices.