Best practices for educators and researchers

Educators
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Is there a single page, thread or wiki that describes best practices for educators at different grade levels or for researchers?

I don’t know the best approach, but would like to help people find advice that transcends my own instincts.

It seems like

  1. early grades should use Seek both to protect student privacy and limit bad observations in our communal database.
  2. at later grades, blindly incentivizing number of observations can result in poor-quality observations with limited follow up.
  3. some high school and university level guidance has resulted in unusually good data sets that are underutilized, for example by standardizing a protocol for collecting and annotating data.

It’d be awesome if there was a single webpage or wiki to which we could direct educators to help optimize their classroom interactions with iNaturalist for pedagogical and research purposes. I apologize if I’ve missed prior threads on this topic and welcome consolidation.

[Mods please feel free to remove if it’s not helpful - but this post was inspired partly by this interaction, which struck me as an example of college classrooms utilizing iNat in a powerful way. https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/326120083\]

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Spontaneously the Educators category comes to mind, as well as this thread: https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/inat-for-educators/7187

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The closest thing on iNatHelp is the Educators’ Guide. It does recommend using Seek for younger children and making students write field journals instead and has the same talking points.

Younger Students

Let me share my experience (U.S. Common Core). I was laughably irresponsible with the Internet as a child, so I would not trust people under the high school level with iNaturalist apps other than Seek. Here’s what I did relating to ecology in every grade level from what I recall:

  • Pre-Kindergarten: learn to say the common names of animals and edible plants in English
  • Kindergarten: learn the relationships between animals, plants, and other organisms such as predation, photosynthesis, sexual dimorphism, life stages, etc.; learn how to write their common names and how to read in general
  • First grade: expand on life stages and being introduced to the concept of the food chain, what germs like bacteria and viruses are in most general terms, learn that things can be poisonous or bad, learn that animals can hurt you if they get angry
  • Second grade: differences in what life appears in different locations based on what they are most suited for and how they are shaped by their environment and evolutionary history (again, in general terms)
  • Third and fourth grade: learn about organs and the separation of tissues in advanced organisms, reiteration of concepts previously taught
  • Fifth and sixth grade: how reproduction works in humans and similar vertebrates (“sex ed”), how genes work in a very general sense, why and how things die, how to perform dissections of small animals and owl pellets,
  • Seventh and eighth grade: learn how the food web in different biomes is structured, the fossil record, cellular biology, basics in bacterial and viral infections and how they show up (the facies) in host organisms, differences between non-predation relationships between organisms (mutualism, commensalism, parasitism), what qualifies as life (“viruses are not alive,” which is semi-true), basics in taxonomy, genetics and inheritance, evolution and its evidence in the form of analogous and vestigial structures

Edit: I think this is a fine path for educating students in biology, but I wish it all happened faster so I could be in a lab by eighth grade (~13 years old). These are probably developmentally appropriate topics for each age because most students didn’t seem to have problems understanding. iNaturalist probably has some use for each of these topics, and the most basic thing an educator can do is look at an observation describing the relevant process or concept.

The Educators category of the forum shows off many people using iNaturalist tools for different activities that seem engaging at various grade levels. However, there’s not a lot of chat about how to make kids at lower education levels behave while doing assignments (very important!), so we could brainstorm here or in some other topic in the category about how to (1) capture the attention of children (2) in a way that is productive to their learning (3) using iNaturalist tools.

On a side note, all of the tools provided by iNaturalist seem to require students to have some level of literacy. As we know about the current state of the average <5th grader in the United States, even Seek would be unsuitable for them to use themselves. Giving kids picture books showing off the different organisms in their area at their different stages of life is a great idea, so maybe assembling a slideshow teaching/quizzing them on how to say the names of the organisms and talk about their features (life stages, sexual dimorphism, dangers to humans, whether or not they are edible, where they can find them in the wild) can help.

Older Students

Having had to use field journals for three of my four years in high school to track weather, tide conditions, location, and all observations this was a lot better foundation for me than if I were to run off on my own and use iNaturalist instead. My high school had a mandatory intro to marine biology class focusing on our local environment’s species diversity and required that we got very familiar with being outside in the freezing cold knee deep in water to take photos, collect water samples, and identify our surroundings. This was fun, so I suggest students in higher levels practice good field methods before ever using iNaturalist apps beyond Seek. Then introduce them to the app, giving them observation and ID quotas for homework etc. might be useful when they become advanced in field methods.

High school students and college students would be fine enough and can possibly handle using iNaturalist alongside a data science class for learning how to process data and working with APIs, which could be good for foundational CS, geospatial sciences, and biology education simultaneously. There’s plenty of room for interdisciplinary education using iNaturalist.

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In the US, science instruction at the K-12 level is informed, guided or outright aligned to the A Framework for Teaching K-12 Science (National Academies Press). Forty nine of the 50 states, including mine (South Dakota), use the Next Generation Science Standards to set the standards for science instruction. Standards include not just the content (Disciplinary Core Ideas - DCI) but also the practices (Science and Engineering Practices -SEP) and how this material relates to the Big Ideas or Cross Cutting Concepts of STEM (see list below).

To see iNat effectively utilized in the age 5-18 classroom would take professional development of educators through workshops, webinars, conferences and professional learning communities and extensive resource development where resources are aligned to major educational guidelines such as the NGSS, the International Baccalaureate, and Sustainable Development Goals plus the mandated curriculum of high contribution nations

This is a lot of work and a lot of money.

Since iNat has taken a grassroots, community led approach on much of its outreach, I don’t see this push for scaling educator resources happening any time soon. Rather, what I hope will happen is that the iNat Ambassador community will eventually coalesce around interest groups and some of the necessary conversations and work can start to happen there.

I have more ideas, of course, on what needs to happen. Connecting researchers and research to classroom teachers and informal educators (nature centers, zoos, museums, aquaria) is literally part of my day job.

Cross Cutting Concepts

  1. Patterns. Observed patterns of forms and events guide organization and classification, and they prompt questions about relationships and the factors that influence them.
  2. Cause and effect: Mechanism and explanation. Events have causes, sometimes simple, sometimes multifaceted. A major activity of science is investigating and explaining causal relationships and the mechanisms by which they are mediated. Such mechanisms can then be tested across given contexts and used to predict and explain events in new contexts.
  3. Scale, proportion, and quantity. In considering phenomena, it is critical to recognize what is relevant at different measures of size, time, and energy and to recognize how changes in scale, proportion, or quantity affect a system’s structure or performance.
  4. Systems and system models. Defining the system under study—specifying its boundaries and making explicit a model of that system—provides tools for understanding and testing ideas that are applicable throughout science and engineering.
  5. Energy and matter: Flows, cycles, and conservation. Tracking fluxes of energy and matter into, out of, and within systems helps one understand the systems’ possibilities and limitations.
  6. Structure and function. The way in which an object or living thing is shaped and its
    substructure determine many of its properties and functions.
  7. Stability and change. For natural and built systems alike, conditions of stability and
    determinants of rates of change or evolution of a system are critical elements of study.