Citizen Science in Schools: Predictors and Outcomes of Participating in Voluntary Political Research
Raffael Heiss,
Desirée Schmuck,
Jörg Matthes and
Carolin Eicher
SAGE Open, 2021, vol. 11, issue 4, 21582440211016428
Abstract:
Citizen science research has been rapidly expanding in the past years and has become a popular approach in youth education. We investigated key drivers of youth participation in a citizen social science school project and the effects of participation on scientific and topic-related (i.e., political) interest and efficacy. Findings suggest that females, more politically and scientifically interested and more scientifically efficacious adolescents were more motivated to learn from the project. Science efficacy was also positively related to external reward motivation (i.e., winning an award). Both learning and external reward motivation increased the likelihood of participation. Pre- and post-measurement further indicated that participation in the project slightly increased science interest, but not science efficacy. However, it did increase both political interest and efficacy. Furthermore, our data revealed a decrease in science efficacy and interest in those who did not participate in the project, indicating an increasing gap in adolescents’ scientific involvement.
Keywords: citizen science; political engagement; education; young people (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)
Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/21582440211016428 (text/html)
Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.
Export reference: BibTeX
RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan)
HTML/Text
Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:sagope:v:11:y:2021:i:4:p:21582440211016428
DOI: 10.1177/21582440211016428
Access Statistics for this article
More articles in SAGE Open
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().