A New Instrument to Assess Scientific Literacy of Citizen Scientists

Abstract

Although a stated goal of many citizen science programs is to improve the scientific literacy of citizen participants, to date there have been few efforts to empirically test whether a citizen science project can meet this goal. One of the few efforts to assess the impact of a citizen science project on participants' scientific literacy used a "generalized" instrument to evaluate pre-post changes in participants' scientific literacy. Our objective was to develop an environmentally focused "context-specific" instrument to evaluate the impact of a citizen science experience on the scientific literacy of its participants.