Middle-schoolers as Citizen Scientists with a Satellite Connection

According to the National Action Council for Minorities in Engineering (NACME), 50 percent or more of all middle-school students plan to drop advanced math and science courses in high-school, regardless of their career interests and without knowing the consequences. Only 15 percent of all U.S. students, and only 6 percent of minority students, graduate from high school with the necessary amount of advanced math and science courses to begin any science-based course of study in college, says NACME. Other research suggests that many U.S. middle-schoolers, especially minority students, cannot describe what scientists and engineers do (Burns et al., 1982).

How can middle-school students, particularly minority students, get the multiple experiences they need to understand what engineers and scientists do? How can they find the motivation to elect advanced high-school math and science courses? The National Science Education Standards ("NSES") advocates a systemic change towards inquiry-based science lessons (NSES, 1996). Beyond this, students need to become engaged in "authentic science learning" which includes data collection rigorous enough for the data to be useful for knowledge acquisition by scientists, governmental agencies and the students themselves. I.e., students need to become fully engaged as "citizen scientists."

Meteorology has led the way in modeling both the effectiveness and motivational attributes of citizen scientists with the 11,000 member "National Weather Service Cooperative Observer Network." Each data point recorded by each member of the network is miniscule but the aggregate can yield essential information. The archives of this organization include even the data collected by Benjamin Franklin.

Modern citizen scientists have technology unavailable in Franklin’s time. Now that the Internet is becoming accessible to nearly every classroom, students have a ready means of "publishing" their data and retrieving data from other students around the country and even the world. One of the premier organizations which enables K-12 students to do this rigorous data collection and publication is "GLOBE," an acronym for "Global Learning and Observations for the Betterment of the Environment." GLOBE is funded by NASA, NOAA and NSF. Currently there are over 6,000 participating schools from all 50 states and 82 countries. Each school must have a certified GLOBE teacher who receives roughly 40 hours of intensive training in the data-collecting protocols.

Students collect data in four areas: atmosphere, hydrology, soil and land cover. Daily atmosphere data collection includes cloud type, cloud cover, rainfall, solid precipitation, minimum daily temperature, maximum daily temperature and current temperature all taken within an hour of solar noon. The land cover data is used as "ground truthing" for the images taken from space by the Thematic Mapper instrument aboard the Landsat satellite. Weekly hydrology data collection includes water temperature, dissolved oxygen, pH, alkalinity and either conductivity for fresh water or salinity for salt water. Another GLOBE connection to satellites is the use of the Global Positioning System (GPS) to determine the latitude, longitude and elevation of each measurement site. Thus, students participating in GLOBE act as "citizen scientists with a satellite connection!"