On Wednesday 2 December at 16:00 CET we are hosting a one-hour online workshop to classify, together, the research on citizen science in education with CitSci Sort.
Hundreds of scientific papers describe students measuring air quality, teachers bringing biodiversity projects into the classroom, or how people learn when they take part in citizen science. But nobody has read and classified them together, using shared criteria. We invite you to do it live: in one hour we will classify papers from the Web of Science category Education & Educational Research on CitSci Sort.
What we will do
CitSci Sort is a collaborative platform by the Ibercivis Foundation for classifying the abstracts of peer-reviewed publications on citizen science. For each paper, the first question is: is citizen science the tool used to produce knowledge, or the subject being studied?
In education, that boundary is particularly interesting. If a school takes part in a project monitoring local biodiversity and the paper reports what was found about that biodiversity, citizen science is the method. If the paper analyses what the students learned by taking part, citizen science becomes the subject of study.
Agenda (60 minutes)
- 10′: what CitSci Sort is and how the three-step classification works.
- 5′: we classify a first abstract together.
- 35′: live classification, with questions answered in the chat.
- 10′: wrap-up on difficult cases, open debates and first results.
The session will be facilitated by Lucía Moreno, from the Ibercivis Foundation.
Who can take part
Anyone. You do not need to be a researcher or a citizen science expert. If you work in education (teachers, trainers, researchers, master’s or PhD students, non-formal education…) your perspective will be especially valuable, but the platform includes guidance so that anyone can classify with good judgement.
We are not looking for individual perfection: each abstract is reviewed by several people and the final label comes from consensus. It is also a great way to discover first-hand what is being researched on citizen science in education: which questions are asked, which projects appear and which platforms are used.
Why it matters
The classifications feed into RIECS-Concept, a Horizon Europe project coordinated by Ibercivis that is designing a European research infrastructure for citizen science. Knowing how citizen science is studied in each discipline, and with which tools, is one of the pieces we need to design it.
If you wish, your contribution can be publicly acknowledged in the project’s results, always with your express consent. You can also take part anonymously.
Practical details
- Date: Wednesday 2 December 2026.
- Time: 16:00 CET (15:00 in Lisbon, London and the Canary Islands).
- Format: online, via Zoom. Duration: 1 hour.
- Registration: register on Zoom
Before the session, please register on CitSci Sort (you can use your Google account). This saves time at the start and gives you a chance to look around the platform beforehand.