Participating in Socioscientific Issue-Oriented Citizen Science Investigations: Mapping the Digital Terrain

Participation in Citizen Science (CitSci) projects can deepen understandings of science and the socially embedded nature of its practices, thereby better understanding science and scientists and better contextualizing science claims and knowledge. This paper draws attention to the reciprocal relationship between a socioscientific issues (SSI) framework and CitSci projects. As part of a broader study of CitSci projects within and across Canada, we developed an SSI analysis framework to understand and interpret how online text resources describing Canadian CitiSci projects integrate SSI perspectives. Our analysis suggests that selected SSI components are underdeveloped in online resources on project websites, and that participant engagement in most projects focus mainly on data collection. This analysis highlights opportunities to further understand and overcome challenges that influence whether such projects are implemented in K–12 and to explore how they might contribute to society and science overall. Keywords: Citizen Science (CitSci), scoping, socioscientific issues (SSI), SSI framework, public science literacy