Diverse and Important Ways Evaluation can Support and Advance Citizen Science

Evaluation offers many benefits for citizen science including the ability to inform design and improve project programming; to aid in understanding impacts on volunteer outcomes; to validate project successes; and to advance best-practices in the field. However, evaluation and subsequent use of its findings in citizen science remains limited. Here, we applied an existing typology to document evaluation use among 15 citizen science project leaders who were deeply involved in a collaborative evaluation process. From their evaluation efforts, these leaders gained new and deeper understanding of their volunteers and programming (conceptual use); made critical changes to their projects (programmatic use); shared their evaluation findings with others (dissemination use); and expanded their attitudes and actions with regard to evaluation (process use). Knowledge gains from evaluation prompted the project leaders in our study to change their training, revise their protocols, add resources, and even terminate an unproductive project. Through reports, presentations, and publications, the project leaders shared findings related to skill proficiency with their volunteers, other staff members, practitioners in other citizen science projects, funders, researchers, and evaluators. Our study makes connections between the evaluation-use literature and citizen science practice, and offers recommendations to address the challenge of limited application of evaluation within citizen science. As such, this paper can help project leaders understand the important and diverse ways evaluation can support individual projects and the larger field. It also raises questions on the role of collaboration in citizen science evaluation.