D3051: Entomologists in the classroom: A scoping review

Science outreach that engages with students in public education systems is necessary for inspiring and engaging with the next generation of scientists, but entomological outreach often focuses on stakeholders in agricultural systems rather than teachers and students in schools. In this work, I present a scoping literature review to identify and characterize instances of entomological researchers engaging with public school teachers and students. Two educational databases (ERIC and Education Source), two science databases(Agricola and Web of Science) and Google Scholar were searched using a common search phrase. Over 900 publications were identified, reviewed, and filtered using specified inclusion and exclusion criteria, yielding 41 relevant pieces of scientific research. A coding schema was then applied to characterize the relevant publications and themes identified. Analysis of these documents indicated that (i) the majority were published in educational journals, (ii) academic researchers tended to not share in the authorship of the publication teachers, (iii) effectiveness of implemented interventions were often not evaluated, and (iv) although the majority of interventions involved students participating in data collection, often student data was not represented.