Most school-based environmental Citizen Science projects ask students to collect data—counting birds, monitoring water quality, or tracking weather patterns. While valuable for scientific research, this approach may miss a crucial opportunity to develop students as active environmental citizens capable of addressing the environmental challenges of the 21st century.
Current State of School Citizen Science
This comprehensive review of 34 studies reveals that most K–12 environmental Citizen Science initiatives follow a "contributory" model where students primarily gather and submit data to scientists. These projects typically take place in non-formal educational settings, focus on improving students' environmental knowledge, and rely heavily on expert mentors and educational resources.
While this approach successfully develops students' environmental knowledge and scientific skills, it has limited impact on environmental attitudes, values, and behaviors—the deeper changes needed for environmental citizenship.
The Environmental Citizenship Gap
The study found significant gaps between current practice and the goal of developing environmental citizens:
Limited Civic Engagement: Few initiatives incorporated stages like civic participation, planning environmental actions, or sustaining social change—all crucial for environmental citizenship development.
Individual vs. Collective Focus: When environmental actions occurred, they were often individual rather than collective, and more private than public, missing opportunities for broader environmental impact.
Missing Transformative Outcomes: Projects rarely addressed structural causes of environmental problems, promoted inter-generational justice, or developed students' environmental rights and duties—key aspects of environmental citizenship.
Keystone Components for Success
The research identified five "keystone components" that most strongly correlate with environmental citizenship development:
• Collective Actions: Students working together on environmental issues
• Civic Participation and Critical Active Engagement: Moving beyond data collection to active problem-solving
• Communicating Findings: Sharing results to influence others and policy
• Planning Actions: Developing strategies for environmental improvement
• Public Sphere Actions: Taking environmental action in community settings
Implications for Practice
To maximize Citizen Science's potential for environmental citizenship, educators should:
1. Shift from Contributory to Collaborative: Design projects where students help formulate research questions, analyze data, and communicate findings, not just collect information.
2. Emphasize Collective Action: Create opportunities for students to work together on environmental solutions that extend beyond the classroom.
3. Connect Local to Global: While starting with local environmental issues, help students understand connections to broader environmental challenges and justice issues.
4. Integrate All EEC Stages: Move beyond inquiry to include planning actions, civic participation, networking across scales, and sustaining environmental change.
The research suggests that when designed thoughtfully, environmental Citizen Science can transform students from passive data collectors into active environmental citizens—but only if we deliberately design for citizenship outcomes, not just scientific ones.
The Bottom Line
This systematic literature review analyzed 34 empirical studies of K–12 environmental Citizen Science (CS) initiatives to determine their potential for promoting Education for Environmental Citizenship (EEC). The researchers examined how participatory and pedagogical components of CS initiatives relate to students' development as "environmental citizens." Results showed that CS initiatives positively impacted students' environmental knowledge and skills, but had limited effects on attitudes, values, and behaviors. Most initiatives were contributory (students mainly collected data) rather than collaborative or co-created, and took place in non-formal educational settings. Key findings revealed strong correlations between communicating findings and collective action, planning actions and local-scale activities, and active student engagement with prevention of environmental problems. The study identified five "keystone components" most important for environmental citizenship: collective actions, civic participation and critical active engagement, communicating findings, planning actions, and public sphere actions. The authors recommend that future K–12 environmental CS initiatives should emphasize more collaborative participation, incorporate all stages of the EEC pedagogical approach, and focus on developing students' capacity for collective environmental action rather than just individual knowledge acquisition.