Citizen Science for K-12 Educators

Award Requirements

To earn the Citizen Science for K-12 Educators badge, participants must:

• Create or log in to a SciStarter account.

• Successfully complete the Foundations of Citizen Science training and earn the corresponding badge.

• Successfully complete the Citizen Science for K-12 Educators training module.

Learning Outcomes

Earning the Citizen Science for K-12 Educators badge signifies that the recipient has successfully demonstrated proficiency in the following learning outcomes:

• Explain the role of citizen science in advancing scientific research and public engagement.

• Apply citizen science practices to strengthen teaching and learning across educational settings.

• Use the SciStarter Project Finder to identify citizen science projects aligned to classroom goals, grade levels, student interests, and local contexts.

• Identify which citizen science experiences are appropriate to different grade levels and developmental stages.

• Integrate citizen science into multidisciplinary learning experiences across content areas.

• Create and organize a classroom-ready collection of citizen science projects using SciStarter Lists to support student participation and investigation.

• Facilitate student participation in citizen science through SciStarter accounts and dashboards to support reflection, documentation, and sustained scientific engagement.

• Transform schoolyards and community spaces into living laboratories for observation, investigation, and discovery.

• Participate in two citizen science projects and reflect on classroom applications.

Skills and Competencies

Recipients of the Citizen Science for K-12 Educators badge have developed and applied the following skills, aligned with an open skills taxonomy recognized by employers and educational institutions:

Instructional and Curriculum Design, including:

• Curriculum Development

• Curriculum Mapping

• Instructional Design

Teaching, including:

• Lesson Planning

• K-12 Education

• Interdisciplinary Teaching

• Experiential Learning

Earn the Citizen Science for K-12 Educators badge

The Citizen Science for K-12 Educators training will help you bring citizen science and experiential learning into your classroom. Learn more at https://scistarter.org/training.

About SciStarter

SciStarter is a global citizen science hub that connects millions of people to thousands of opportunities to participate in real scientific research. We help people turn curiosity into Acts of Science through a powerful project and event finder, personalized dashboards, and tools that make participation easy across projects, websites, and apps. Led by the SciStarter Foundation, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, and supported by a mission-aligned LLC for client services, SciStarter uses evidence-based approaches that are field-tested and scaled to support participants, scientists, and facilitators while coordinating major initiatives such as Citizen Science Month and Do NASA Science LIVE.