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Innovating approaches for scientific education and research in environmental and marine sciences
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This paper describes a citizen science and educational project in which students and volunteers contribute to long-term environmental monitoring, using engagement with scientific problems as a motivational tool for sustained participation. The project demonstrates how education-based approaches can support continuous volunteer commitment to environmental data collection.
Citizen-science can give a valid help to scientific investigation, and this is especially true for environment monitoring programs. Neverless, motivate and enable volunteers in a long-term commitment to a scientific problem represents an essential problem. The presented project is an example on how this long-term commitment can be guaranteed trough an educational path that involves students, not only in data collection but also in problem definition and data analysis. We tried to identify and harmonizing the existing educational plans for improving STEM teaching and learning (STEM is a curriculum for educate students in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics in an interdisciplinary and applied approach, integrating the four disciplines into a cohesive learning path based on real-world applications), prioritizing hands-on learning to increase student interest and engagement. In particular, we describe an example of how two different approachs for educate students on marine sciences can interact in the context of environmental monitoring, applied to problems such as biodiversity, pollution from marine litters, and the the impact of this problem on the marine environment. http://dx.doi.org/10.4995/HEAd15.2015.292
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