Yaela Golumbic

• PhD
• Head of citizen science research at The Steinhardt Museum of Natural History

Citizen science represents an important opportunity for school students to make real-world connections with science through context-based learning with the potential to increase their engagement, enjoyment and understanding of science. However, to date, citizen science has not experienced wide uptake in school settings and there is a paucity of inf...

Citizen science is growing rapidly with positive outcomes documented for ecological research, conservation, policy, innovation, and increased citizen stewardship. This rapid increase provides an opportunity to reflect on the characteristics of citizen science projects and determine their diverse goals, practices and outcomes. This paper focuses on...

This Research Topic explores the reciprocal relationship between citizen science and science communication, investigating a wide range of communication strategies employed in citizen science. Contributions include original research, case studies and theoretical perspectives that discuss Research Topic including interactions within and between citiz...

This report is licenced under: CC BY 4.0 The workshop was organised by Katja Mayer and Claudia Göbel in collaboration with the Zentrum Soziale Innovation ZSI. Cite as: Mayer, Katja; Göbel, Claudia; Alhutter, Doris; Aspee Quiroga, Nicolle; Berr,Katharina; Cavalcanti de Alcântara, Rafaela; Gichuki, Leah; Gold, Margaret; Golumbic, Yaela; Haklay, Muki...

This article reports on initial findings from Learning By Doing, a citizen science research project funded by a NSW DOE Strategic Research Grant. Our study aimed to understand the process of integrating citizen science into schools, the perceived outcomes and impacts for students, and ways to evaluate citizen science projects. In this part of the p...

Introduction: Attracting and recruiting volunteers is a key aspect of managing a citizen science initiative. Science communication plays a central role in this process. In this context, project descriptions are of particular importance, as they are very often, the first point of contact between a project and prospective participants. As such, they...

Published in Hebrew, in Israeli Sociology. Citizen science is a growing field of research and practice, in which volunteers engage in active scientific research. This paper describes citizen science ability to promote environmental awareness and social involvement using the case of the Radon Home Survey - a citizen science project for measuring and...

The World Health Organization (WHO) maintains a list of medicines and medical devices, essential medicines, that should be available to everyone, to form a functioning healthcare system. Yet, many of these medicines remain out of reach for people around the world. One significant barrier to improving the accessibility of essential medicines is a pa...

In recent years, there has been widening interest in and opportunities for public and school engagement with science through citizen science initiatives. This article focuses on the different ways incorporating citizen science in schools can promote meaningful and broad learning outcomes, and provide students the opportunities to develop knowledge...

Over the past decade, Citizen Science (CS) has shown great potential to transform the power of the crowd into knowledge of societal value. Many projects and initiatives have produced high quality scientific results by mobilizing peoples' interest in science to volunteer for the public good. Few studies have attempted to map citizen science as a fie...

Advances in digital technologies have given rise to ‘citizen science’ which engages non-professionals in scientific research and provides participants with diverse learning opportunities. However, evaluating such learning outcomes has proven challenging with many biases and unexplored dimensions. This study aimed to assess learning processes and ou...

Background and objective: There is currently no standardised way to share information across disciplines about initiatives, including fields such as health, environment, basic science, manufacturing, media and international development. All problems, including complex global problems such as air pollution and pandemics require reliable data sharin...

Scientific concepts and core ideas are fundamental for scientific inquiry and research. However, they are not always understood by non-scientists who encounter science in the media, conversations with friends, and other daily contexts. To assess how non-scientists reason with science in daily life, we extend the work described by Drummond and Fisch...

Social innovations are usually understood as new ideas, initiatives, or solutions that make it possible to meet the challenges of societies in fields such as social security, education, employment, culture, health, environment, housing, and economic development. On the one hand, many citizen science activities serve to achieve scientific as well as...

The COVID-19 pandemic has placed public health and wellbeing at the forefront of public concerns and interests, transforming the ways people interact and engage with science. One way to support and expand such engagement is through citizen science, which has seen huge growth over the past decade. Since many scientific fields are still largely under...

Co-created citizen science offers practical tools for implementing science communication theories by increasing public participation in scientific research, empowering communities and advancing situated scientific knowledge. However, delivering such an approach presents a number of key challenges around funding, fostering working partnerships betwe...

Citizen science is a promising field for educational practices and research. However, it is also highly heterogeneous, and learning happens in diverse ways, according to project tasks and participants’ activities. Therefore, we adopt a sociocultural view of learning, in which understanding learning requires a close analysis of the situation created...

Citizen science is a growing field of research and practice, generating new knowledge and understanding through the collaboration of citizens in scientific research. As the field expands, it is becoming increasingly important to consider its potential to foster education and learning opportunities. Although progress has been made to support learnin...

This paper identifies the diverse ways in which participants engage with science, through the same citizen science project. Using multiple data sources, we describe various activities conducted by citizen scientists in an air quality project, and characterize the motivations driving their engagement. Findings reveal several themes, indicative of pa...

Growth retardation and stress-induced premature plant senescence are accompanied by a severe yield reduction and raise a major agro-economic concern. To improve biomass and yield in agricultural crops under mild stress conditions, the survival must be changed to productivity mode. Our previous successful attempts to delay premature senescence and g...

Citizen science is transforming the ways scientific knowledge is created, in that citizens participate in active scientific research, and large scientific databases can be accessed online. However, data availability does not guarantee public use or the relevance of these resources. This paper addresses the ways in which non-expert adults involved i...

As a rapidly growing field, citizen science which involves non-experts in active scientific research, is attracting much interest from scientists, governments and publics, worldwide. In Australia alone, hundreds of citizen science projects exist with over 100,000 participants contributing to scientific data collection, classification and analysis....

A ‘citizen science’ approach was evaluated as an approach to organize an extensive radon survey to be representative of the population of either single regions or a whole country. The “RadonTest” online system allowed schoolchildren to undertake and record short-term radon tests in their homes. Measurements were carried out in Israel using charcoal...

In this report, we aimed to systematise and elaborate on the ideas discussed during the COST Action WG2 workshop “Systematic review on training requirements and recommendations for Citizen Science” that took place in Riga on 12-13th November 2018. Building on the input from the workshop participants’ broad range of different perspectives and expert...

The rise of citizen science in the past decade has brought many opportunities for scientists and publics alongside many challenges and questions regarding best practices. These include questions regarding public engagement, project design and measures of success. The aim of this study is to better understand what makes citizen science projects scie...

Learning in a networked society is presented in this symposium with the basic assumption that “schooling” and “society” cannot be considered as separate entities and should bring together the theoretical and practical tools of scientists in both the social and educational sciences. Despite the powerful potential for cross-fostering of ideas between...

Seeking to promote science communication, civic engagement, and informal education, citizen science is a genre of research that connects scientists and non-scientists around projects involving science. This meeting point creates opportunities for potential benefits to both sides. Scientists may advance their research and obtain prestigious funding...

Technological developments, social networking and the emergence of sensory micro-computation platforms have facilitated the recent growth of citizen science-public participation in scientific research. Citizen science provides lay audiences platforms for data collection and classification alongside access to large scientific databases. Although the...

This chapter explores the growing trend of using innovative tools, particularly low cost micro-sensors and mobile apps, to facilitate the citizen participation process within an environmental monitoring programme. Special focus will be put on tools that are linked to major initiatives that form citizens’ observatories (CitObs) on air quality and th...

Background: Adenosine-to-inosine (A-to-I) RNA editing is an epigenetic modification catalyzed by adenosine deaminases acting on RNA (ADARs), and is especially prevalent in the brain. We used the highly accurate microfluidics-based multiplex PCR sequencing (mmPCR-seq) technique to assess the effects of development and environmental stress on A-to-I...

An Arctic community seeks to understand how to use and benefit from new climate models prepared by another country’s meteorological service and distributed online. Residents of two neighbouring countries address complex environmental, technological, and civic implications of a new high-speed train line connecting them, using both physical demonstra...

Increased interest in public engagement with science worldwide has resulted in the growth of funding opportunities for scientists in the rapidly expanding field of citizen science. This paper describes a case study based on interviews and observations, including a six-month field diary, of ten scientists who engaged in a citizen science project to...

Recent developments in sensory and communication technologies have made the development of portable air-quality (AQ) micro-sensing units (MSUs) feasible. These MSUs allow AQ measurements in many new applications, such as ambulatory exposure analyses and citizen science. Typically, the performance of these devices is assessed using the mean error or...

Abstract Recent developments in sensory and communication technologies have made the development of portable air-quality (AQ) micro-sensing units (MSUs) feasible. These MSUs allow AQ measurements in many new applications, such as ambulatory exposure analyses and citizen science. Typically, the performance of these devices is assessed using the mean...

Children spend substantial part of their childhood in school buildings. The school staff might not have the time or knowledge to investigate the indoor environment, even though they acknowledge it could be improved, nor do they have the capacity to have a dialogue with the students regarding good indoor environment. As part of CITI-SENSE project, w...

Adenosine (A) to inosine (I) RNA editing is a post-transcriptional modification process that can affect synaptic function. Transcripts encoding the kainate GRIK1 and AMPA GluA2 glutamate receptor subunits undergo editing that leads to a glycine/arginine (Q/R) exchange and reduced Ca(2+) permeability. We hypothesized that editing at these sites coul...

Glutaminase-deficient mice (GLS1 hets), with reduced glutamate recycling, have a focal reduction in hippocampal activity, mainly in CA1, and manifest behavioral and neurochemical phenotypes suggestive of schizophrenia resilience. To address the basis for the hippocampal hypoactivity, we examined synaptic plastic mechanisms and glutamate receptor ex...