TY - JOUR T1 - Aligning interests: Integrating Citizen Science Efforts into Schools Through Service Requirements JF - bioRxiv DO - 10.1101/304766 SP - 304766 AU - Ginger Tsueng AU - Arun Kumar AU - Steven M. Nanis AU - Andrew I Su Y1 - 2018/01/01 UR - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2018/04/21/304766.abstract N2 - Citizen science is an increasingly valuable tool for both scientists and educators. For researchers, citizen science is a means of more quickly investigating questions which would otherwise be time-consuming and costly to study. For educators, citizen science offers a means to engage students in actual research and improve learning outcomes. One of the biggest challenges for citizen science projects is recruitment, and students represent a potential solution to this issue. Since most citizen science projects are usually designed with research goals in mind, many lack the necessary educator materials for successful integration in a formal science education (FSE) setting. In an ideal world, researchers and educators would build the necessary materials together; however, many researchers lack the time, resources, and networks to create these materials early on in the life of a citizen science project. For resource-poor projects, we propose an intermediate entry point for recruiting from the educational setting: community service or service learning requirements (CSSLRs). Many schools require students to participate in community service or service learning activities in order to graduate. Although the merits of making volunteer contributions mandatory for students is the subject of much debate, this requirement still exists for many students creating a need for quality volunteer opportunities. With the help of a volunteer fulfilling a CSSLR, we investigated the need for quality volunteer opportunities created by CSSLRs in San Diego county (where there are no state-mandated CSSLRs), compared with other known locations with municipally-set or state-set CSSLRs, examined the explicitly-stated motivations for having CSSLRs, and explored how citizen science projects–even virtual ones, like Mark2Cure– might meet the needs of students fulfilling CSSLRs. ER -