# Citizen science for educational sciences: engaging educators in the production of structured practice-based evidence on a large scale

Ignacio Atal, Nathanaël Jeune, Carole Gabard, Philippe Dessus, Murillo Pagnotta

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## To cite this version:

Ignacio Atal, Nathanaël Jeune, Carole Gabard, Philippe Dessus, Murillo Pagnotta. Citizen science for educational sciences: engaging educators in the production of structured practice-based evidence on a large scale. Teacher Development, 2025, pp.1-22. 10.1080/13664530.2025.2523359. hal-05351086

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# Citizen science for educational sciences: engaging educators in the production of structured practice-based evidence on a large scale

Ignacio Atal, Nathanaël Jeune, Carole Gabard, Philippe Dessus & Murillo Pagnotta

**To cite this article:** Ignacio Atal, Nathanaël Jeune, Carole Gabard, Philippe Dessus & Murillo Pagnotta (28 Jul 2025): Citizen science for educational sciences: engaging educators in the production of structured practice-based evidence on a large scale, Teacher Development, DOI: 10.1080/13664530.2025.2523359

**To link to this article:** https://doi.org/10.1080/13664530.2025.2523359

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# Citizen science for educational sciences: engaging educators in the production of structured practice-based evidence on a large scale

Ignacio Atal<sup>a,b,c,d</sup>, Nathanaël Jeune<sup>a,b</sup>, Carole Gabard<sup>a,b</sup>, Philippe Dessus<sup>d</sup> and Murillo Pagnotta<sup>a,b</sup>

<sup>a</sup>INSERM U1284, System Engineering and Evolution Dynamics, Université Paris Cité, Paris, France; <sup>b</sup>Learning Planet Institute, Research Unit Learning Transitions (UR LT, 202324521H, joint unit with CY Cergy Paris University), Paris, France; <sup>c</sup>Laboratoire de Sciences Cognitives et Psycholinguistique, École Normale Supérieure, CNRS, EHESS, PSL University, Paris, France; <sup>d</sup>Laboratoire de Recherche sur les Apprentissages en Contexte, Université Grenoble Alpes, Grenoble, France

## ABSTRACT

Every day, millions of educators test new practices. If a small proportion of them published their locally produced practice-based evidence in a structured manner, this could become a promising knowledge base for educators. The authors developed a citizen science project to promote the publication of educator-led research in France. They trained volunteers to create communities of educators and to facilitate workshops. During workshops, community members followed a common research methodology to produce contextualised evidence on the capacity of shared actions to address shared challenges. A collaborative platform helped educators produce, peer-review and publish their research. In 2020–21, 168 educators from primary to higher education joined 10 communities and initiated 60 research projects. The results suggest that: i) Using research methods can improve the quality of practice-based evidence; ii) Using a common methodology and platform can support educators from different contexts addressing shared challenges; and iii) Community-based recruitment can help with engaging educators.

## ARTICLE HISTORY

Received 26 April 2024
Accepted 14 January 2025

## KEYWORDS

Citizen science; practice-based evidence; collective intelligence; teachers' professional development; teacher communities

## Introduction

Every day, educators – teachers, trainers, principals, district managers – make decisions to address the educational challenges they face. These decisions are based on a variety of sources such as conversations with colleagues, blogs, pre-service and in-service training, governmental directives, research results, as well as their own past experiences. However, the information obtained from these sources may be untrustworthy (e.g., not supported by evidence), irrelevant (e.g., unrelated to the educator's context) or inaccessible (e.g., obscured by academic jargon). The evidence-based education movement suggests that educators

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can improve their decisions based on evidence produced in systematic, critical and transparent research settings (Davies 1999). In recent decades, educational researchers and policy makers have put a strong focus on the conduct of randomised controlled trials (RCTs), considered by many as the 'gold standard' in evidence production (Connolly, Keenan, and Urbanska 2018; Hedges and Schauer 2018; Torgerson and Torgerson 2001). However, a persistent gap exists between outcomes from RCTs suggesting effective practices and their use by practitioners. One reason may be that recommendations emerging from research conducted in such controlled settings are often unrelated to the real-life contexts in which educators work (Dagenais et al. 2012; Harrison and McCaig 2017). Also, in RCTs researchers need to narrow down the educational objectives of the interventions under study (e.g. through the use of standardised tests as primary measures to evaluate effectiveness), possibly leaving aside goals and values important to educators (Biesta 2010). Furthermore, prescribing standardised practices issued from research may go against a vision of educators as 'active agents of improvement rather than ... passive receivers of knowledge developed by others' (Bryk 2015, 469).

Under the term *practice-based evidence*, other researchers argue that practitioners can produce by themselves relevant evidence about 'what works in their context' as they can obtain and contrast evidence about the efficacy of their practices (Doabler et al. 2021; Green 2008). Practitioners are not expected to control the messy unpredictability of the real world when analysing their own practices, but could still produce reports that are rich in detail, concrete and highly contextualised. A database of practice-based evidence could become a knowledge base for educators providing narratives of past experimentations that are actionable and tailored to concrete educational contexts (Hiebert, Gallimore, and Stigler 2002). Such a knowledge base would not lead to generalisable normative recommendations, but rather help educators to better judge whether a practice is worthy to be implemented in their context (Biesta 2010; Dupriez and Branka 2018). It could also help educators and researchers identify patterns across reports to gain a better understanding about educational practices and their impact (Fishman 2005; Iwakabe and Gazzola 2009).

## The shortcomings of practice-based evidence

Building and using a knowledge base from practice-based evidence in education is not straightforward. The first shortcoming is related to the *quality* (or internal validity) of evidence when it is produced by practitioners themselves. If a systematic protocol for implementing a practice and observing its results is not followed, or if the educators' prior beliefs go unexamined, the evidence will be less reliable and trustworthy as compared to evidence from highly controlled studies. To increase evidence quality, educators could apply research principles to plan, record and analyse observations about their practices, as done through action research (Cohen, Manion, and Morrison 2017a), or more sophisticated single-case experimental designs (Plavnick and Ferreri 2013). They could also involve external educators in different steps of their inquiry, or receive guidance from researchers (Coburn, Penuel, and Geil 2013). The second shortcoming is about the *transferability* (or external validity) of practice-based evidence. If the conclusions are too dependent on the original context of the practitioner, it may be hard to transfer any gained insights to other contexts. Thus, the reports need to clarify how the reported practice may be
implemented elsewhere and discuss the main factors affecting its implementation (Humphrey et al. 2016). The third shortcoming is about *accessibility*. If high-quality reports exist but are hard to find or to understand, others will not benefit from them. The reports must be intelligible, stored in user-friendly databases and publicly shared (Hiebert, Gallimore, and Stigler 2002).

But compiling a collection of reports is not enough. Educators must be able to navigate the database to decide what is meaningful to be examined (Hiebert, Gallimore, and Stigler 2002; Iwakabe and Gazzola 2009). The fourth shortcoming is thus the *identification of relevant reports*. What counts as 'relevant' depends on the specific concerns and context of the educator looking for insights. For example, educators may wish to find evidence about a specific challenging situation or about a specific practice, within a specific age group, discipline, socio-economic context and so on. To solve this, the collection of reports would need an indexing system that accounts for the inherent multidimensionality of educational goals, practices and systems. To improve the quality, transferability and accessibility of practice-based evidence and facilitate their identification, educators might benefit from following reporting guidelines. By doing so, they would provide the minimal information required for others to understand the context, methods and results of their reports. In the medical sciences, guidelines exist for each research method (Simera et al. 2010), and compliance with such guidelines is considered as one of the main solutions 'to increase value and reduce waste in biomedical research' (Macleod et al. 2014, 104).

The fifth shortcoming is related to the *massive number of reports* that would be needed for any external educator querying such a database to find a relevant report. Such a database may be more valuable if it included not only one but different points of views for the same object under study. For instance, educators may gain deep insight if they read several (and potentially contradictory) reports for a situation of interest, or even a synthesis of them (Iwakabe and Gazzola 2009). Collecting such a high number of reports may sound unrealistic, but the potential exists: in France, where the project reported here is based, there are about 1.2 million educators in primary and secondary schools (Direction de l'évaluation, de la prospective et de la performance 2021). Even if a small proportion of them shared their practice-based evidence, this would add up to a considerable number of reports and may include a sufficiently dense amount of educational aims, practices and contexts.

The sixth shortcoming is *engagement*. Conducting systematic inquiries about one's own practices and writing reports about them may be a burden for educators who often lack time and incentives to engage effort to fulfil such activities (Cochran-Smith and Lytle 1990; Dana and Yendol-Hoppey 2020). The large amount of reports needed calls for the engagement of a large number of educators. Furthermore, educators should also be engaged in the use of evidence created by others. The right guidance, support and incentive structures are thus needed.

In summary, if trustworthy, accessible and organised in a structured and easy-to-query database, practice-based evidence could become a promising source of information to help educators identify what could work best in their context. The value of such a database would increase if a high number of educators were engaged in its creation and update. Several frameworks exist to guide educators in the creation of high-quality reports about their practices, but rare are the examples that have integrated the
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publication of such reports to help others inform their practices (see Appendix S1 in the online supplemental materials for a review).

## Citizen science to create practice-based evidence

We have designed the Profs-Chercheurs (Teachers as Researchers) programme. Its main goal is to engage a large number of educators to produce rich and contextualised practice-based evidence that is trustworthy, published in an openly accessible database and organised in a way that allows practitioners to query it, find relevant work, compare the evidence and identify what practice could better work for them. The term ‘teachers’ (Profs) in Profs-Chercheurs is synecdochic, referring not only to those who teach directly but to all educators. The term ‘researchers’ (Chercheurs) is meant to characterise ‘educators as active inquirers … bound together by norms and structures akin to a scientific community’ (Bryk 2015, 469).

The Profs-Chercheurs programme is designed as a citizen science project (or public participation in scientific research). In citizen science projects, researchers from diverse fields such as astronomy or ecology design methods and tools to engage members of the public in research (Shirk et al. 2012). The public may be involved not only in the collection of data following protocols defined by researchers, but also in the definition of research questions, methods, data analysis and reporting, generating new science-based knowledge difficult or impossible to reach by small teams of scholars (Haklay et al. 2021; Skarlatidou and Haklay 2021). The citizen science framework is mostly known for its application in natural sciences, but it has also been applied to address research questions in Social Sciences and Humanities such as social perception of science and youngsters’ perceptions of digital technology (Tauginienė et al. 2020). Viewed as a citizen science project, the Profs-Chercheurs programme’s focus is on its capacity to engage educators in producing knowledge about educational practices from their practice-based inquiries. Contrary to common citizen science projects in which anyone from the public may contribute to research projects, the Profs-Chercheurs programme involves professionals of education to be engaged in research about their own educational practices. However, the Profs-Chercheurs programme goes beyond traditional practitioner research (e.g. Cochran-Smith and Lytle 2009) as it seeks to engage a network of practitioners in the production of open-access research about educational practices (Robinson et al. 2018). The Profs-Chercheurs programme can also be viewed as a professional development (PD) activity aiming to improve educational practice. Another article from our team focuses on this specific point (Pagnotta et al. 2022). Furthermore, the Profs-Chercheurs programme could be viewed through the lenses of the emerging field of *collective intelligence*, to investigate how best to find collective solutions to collective educational problems (Mulgan 2018).

This article has two aims. The first is to describe the Profs-Chercheurs programme in detail such that others may adopt or adapt it. The second aim is to report the results of its implementation in France during the academic year 2020–21, attesting to its potential to engage educators in the creation of a knowledge base for educators. Finally, we discuss how features of the Profs-Chercheurs programme address the shortcomings listed above.
## The Profs-Chercheurs programme

In a nutshell, the programme trains volunteer educators to create communities and to facilitate regular workshops in which community members follow a common methodology designed to motivate collaboration and reflection about their practices, while at the same time producing structured records of practice-based evidence. The work of communities is undertaken in a collaborative publication platform to promote wide collaboration across communities and to feed a shared and public database of practice-based evidence.

## The Profs-Chercheurs methodology

The Profs-Chercheurs methodology reflects an idealised model of scientific inquiry for practitioners. It is structured around four activities in which educators collaboratively produce four types of written objects we respectively call Challenges, Actions, Feedback and Syntheses (see Figure 1). Each object has a dedicated template to ensure complete reporting (see Appendix S2 in the online supplemental materials).

In the first activity, educators identify specific Challenges they want to address from the background of their concerns. Challenges are titled as research questions of the type 'How to [attain an objective]?' For example: 'How to help students become autonomous in their learning?' or: 'How to improve collaboration among teachers within the school?' A Challenge description should provide sufficient details about the situation of concern while remaining general enough to be relevant to educators in different contexts.

In the second activity, educators identify practice-based hypotheses called Actions, corresponding to concrete strategies that could be implemented to overcome a Challenge. Ideas for Actions may come from different sources including personal experience, colleagues and research literature. For each Challenge, educators may identify several independent, but potentially complementary Actions. For example, to address the Challenge 'How to improve collaboration among students?', an Action may be 'Implementing tutoring between peers', and another may be 'Assigning specific roles to students during group activities'. An Action description should provide sufficient details for others to understand its implementation and should also be general enough to allow educators from different contexts to implement it.

In the third activity, educators prepare and implement an Action, observe the evolution of their challenging situation and share written Feedback in which they report contextualised evidence about the capacity of the Action to address (or not) the Challenge. While Challenges and Actions may be shared between educators working in different contexts, each Feedback reports a single Action implementation and is therefore always context specific. For example, two educators in different contexts (e.g., in different geographical areas, in primary vs secondary school) facing the same Challenge 'How to improve collaboration among students?' and testing the same Action 'Implementing tutoring between peers' may provide potentially contradictory Feedback. Feedback reports should provide enough details to understand the context, how the Action was implemented and how the Challenge evolved. Before implementing their Action, educators can follow a dedicated guide (see Appendix S3 in the online supplemental materials) to design experimental protocols and observation tools to increase the systematicity of their
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inquiry. The more basic example is to predefine a set of (quantitative or qualitative) variables to capture the state of the challenging situation, and a set of time-points to conduct repeated observations (e.g., before, during and after Action implementation). The result is a 'field notes' document that educators can use to record their observations by themselves or with the help of others. Educators can use the recorded observations as supporting material in their Feedback.

In the fourth activity, educators systematically examine and summarise the results from multiple Feedback objects in a Synthesis to answer broad questions of interest (e.g., 'Is Action A able to address Challenge X across contexts?' or 'How do the different Actions compare in their ability to address Challenge X?').

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**Figure 1.** The Profs-Chercheurs methodology. The Profs-Chercheurs methodology is structured around four activities resulting in the production of Challenges, Actions, Feedback reports and Syntheses. Each Action is defined in relation to a specific Challenge, and each Feedback reports the implementation of a specific Action (and thus a specific Challenge). Syntheses are aggregated analyses of several Feedbacks shared for a single Action, for a set of Actions related to a single Challenge or for another combination of interest. Each Challenge inaugurates a collaborative research project to which any concerned educator can contribute over time. Individuals may contribute by co-authoring one (or several) of the possible written objects issued from the activities. Some individuals may collaboratively identify a new Challenge. Others may describe one or more Actions to address it. Some time later, other educators may decide to implement an interesting Action and provide Feedback, even if they did not participate in the previous steps. Once there is sufficient Feedback, another group or individual may summarise the available evidence in a Synthesis. Although the activities are logically linked to form a research cycle, individuals themselves do not need to conduct all activities for a given cycle to be concluded. This relative independence of a research cycle from a specific set of individuals allows for the collective research to advance while allowing individuals to contribute according to their abilities, time and interests.
At each activity, a peer-review system allows educators to help each other improve the overall quality and accessibility of their writing following activity-specific review prompts (see Appendix S4 in the online supplemental materials). The activities of the Profs-Chercheurs methodology happen during workshops (usually two hours in length) in which dedicated facilitators organise the collective work of participants by creating subgroups and assigning them to activities of the Profs-Chercheurs methodology according to their individual interests and concerns (e.g., following an initial roundtable). For example, a group of two to four educators may work on the description of a new Challenge, another may conduct the peer review of an Action written by others during a previous workshop, and a last group may prepare their 'field notes' for another Action. The facilitators explain and clarify the Profs-Chercheurs methodology, provide access to the templates, promote a supportive atmosphere for educators to openly share their concerns and practices, and manage time.

## The Profs-Chercheurs communities

The educators that join workshops and do the activities are organised in Profs-Chercheurs communities. The research team trains and assists volunteers to create their own Profs-Chercheurs communities and facilitate workshops (see Appendix S5 in the online supplemental materials). The facilitators are in charge of recruiting members and defining membership rules considering the concerns, job context and roles of their potential members. For instance, some Profs-Chercheurs communities could be open to all educators in the same institution regardless of their topics of concern, while other communities could be open to educators interested in the same topic (e.g., maths teaching, school administration) even if they worked at different institutions. Facilitators are also in charge of defining a workshop schedule and dealing with administrative needs (e.g., finding support for workshops to be considered as a PD activity).

## Collaborative publication platform

We developed a collaborative publication platform (https://plateforme.profschercheurs.org) to support the work of communities, mutualise their efforts and build a centralised database of practice-based evidence. It includes a search engine designed to allow educators to identify relevant reports to inform their practices. By navigating across published Challenges, educators may find one that captures their concern. By querying the corresponding Actions, they may find one that is compelling and easy to implement based on their available resources. They may find Feedback reports from one (or several) educators practising in contexts similar to theirs. Maybe a Synthesis of multiple Feedback objects was already conducted, providing them with a summary of the evidence.

Profs-Chercheurs community members get a personal account which allows them to create new objects (Challenge, Action, Feedback or Synthesis), add other users as coauthors and collaboratively describe the objects (following integrated templates) using text, images, videos, links and documents. Coauthors can submit their objects to peer-review, reviewers can follow review prompts and share their report with coauthors, who can then
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improve their work. Drafts can be made visible for users with an account to avoid unnecessary efforts (e.g., duplicated Challenges). Coauthors can ultimately make their work visible to the public.

# Implementation of the Profs-Chercheurs programme

## Recruitment

We conducted an observational study following the implementation of the Profs-Chercheurs programme in France between September 2020 and July 2021. The programme started with one Profs-Chercheurs community run by the research team: 'Les Mercredis du CRI' (see Appendix S6 in the online supplemental materials). Weekly online workshops started in October 2020 with participants recruited through personal contacts and word of mouth. Educators could come to these workshops at their own pace and at no cost to them. We also provided two online training sessions for educators interested in becoming facilitators in November 2020 and May 2021, at no cost to them. Trained facilitators coordinated their own recruitment efforts with our support. Educators joined communities through a unique online form. At sign-up they were invited to give consent to participate in this study, but this was not a requirement to join a community. Only data from community members who gave consent were analysed here, and we refer to them as 'participants' hereafter.

## Participants

Participants' characteristics were collected at sign-up. A total of 163 educators (70% female) joined the Profs-Chercheurs programme throughout the year (Figure 2). Fifty-eight (36%) and 39 (24%) participants were teachers at primary and secondary school, respectively; 31 (19%) had as their main responsibility supporting teachers, 16 (10%) were

<figure><img src="image_18.png" /><figcaption>**Figure 2.** Cumulative number of subscriptions to the Profs-Chercheurs programme. Cumulative number of subscriptions to Profs-Chercheurs communities (red line), cumulative number of educators joining at least one workshop (blue dashed line), the dates of community creation (red rhombus) and the dates of facilitators training (arrows).</figcaption></figure>
teachers at university level and/or researchers, and 19 (12%) were other educators including project managers and members of NGOs. Public (85%) and private (10%) educational institutions having students with deprived (15%), privileged (9%) or mixed (77%) socio-economic status were represented. Primary and secondary school teachers had a median of 16.5 years of teaching experience (range: [0, 39]). Participants from 28 (out of 101) French departments joined (see Figure S1 in the online supplemental materials), as well as five participants from other French-speaking countries or international schools abroad. In France, the Occitanie region (rectorate of Montpellier) was the most represented. In December 2020 authorities from the rectorate of Montpellier assigned a district manager to the task of 'developing the cooperation between educators' at the regional level. This district manager associated the Profs-Chercheurs programme with his designated task and consequently instigated the creation of six Profs-Chercheurs communities during the year, all of which benefited from institutional support. Some representative examples of participants' motivations to join the programme were: 'to exchange with other colleagues to enrich my practices', 'to experiment and learn to analyse my observations', 'getting closer to research' and 'to experiment the methodology to create my own community'.

## Data collection

Facilitators provided community-level characteristics including the focus of interest (if any) and the institutional support they received for the community activities (if any). Facilitators recorded information about the workshops they conducted: date; format (in-person, online, mixed); attendees and activities of the Profs-Chercheurs methodology conducted. Finally, we obtained object-level characteristics from the collaborative publication platform, including coauthorship; written content; and peer reviews.

## Data analysis

We summarised the characteristics of Profs-Chercheurs communities and computed summary statistics of the number and format of workshops conducted and number of participants per workshop. We operationalised participants' engagement in the Profs-Chercheurs programme according to their visible participation in Profs-Chercheurs communities. Thus, we computed summary statistics of the number of workshops (and workshop hours) attended per participant, as well as their participation in the different stages of the Profs-Chercheurs methodology. We counted the number of Challenges, Actions, Feedback and Syntheses, created and reviewed. We described the thematics and scope of the Challenges with a peer-reviewed description using content analysis (Cohen, Manion, and Morrison 2017b) (protocol in Appendix S7 in the online supplemental materials). We explored the extent to which the growing database of Challenges could grasp the concerns of newcomers. To do so, we calculated the number of new participants that were needed for a new Challenge to be suggested. Finally, we described the nature of the collaboration happening as groups of individuals contributed to the same Challenge. We evaluated to which extent these collaborations implied individuals with different educational roles and from different geographical departments.
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## Research reproducibility

The essential tools to implement the Profs-Chercheurs methodology are the tem-
plates to produce the different objects, field notes and peer-review prompts.
English translations of the versions used in this study are available in Appendix
S2–4 in the online supplemental materials. A version history of the French tools is
available as open source on a dedicated repository (https://github.com/iatal/
profschercheurs). This study was preregistered in April 2021 (https://osf.io/h5cwy/
). All data analyses were done in R v3.6.3. Raw datasets and codes are shared upon
request.

## Results

We start by providing a description of the spread of the Profs-Chercheurs programme, the overall research efforts, outputs and collaboration in play, before describing in detail the effort of a specific group of educators on a specific Challenge.

## Communities

The Profs-Chercheurs programme was expanded to educators outside the direct reach of the research team through the training of facilitators. Respectively, 17 and 18 individuals joined the first and second facilitators training. Following the training, 14 facilitators established nine Profs-Chercheurs communities. Most facilitators had as main responsibility supporting or training teachers (N = 9), while others were teachers themselves (N = 4) or other educators (N = 1). Profs-Chercheurs communities were created on the initiative of facilitators for a wide variety of reasons: addressing the challenges shared in a school, those of teaching a specific discipline, those around a common theme of interest or the challenges of a specific professional role (Table 1). Half of communities obtained institutional support to recognise workshop attendance as PD activities.

Participants were unevenly engaged with the Profs-Chercheurs programme. A total of 127 (78%) individuals joined at least one workshop. Although 77 participants subscribed to 'Les Mercredis du CRI', only 36 of them attended at least one workshop. For the other communities, the number of community members ranged from 3 to 26, and most of them attended workshops (Table 1). With the exception of one incipient group not yet active, Profs-Chercheurs communities offered a total of 118 workshops (range [1, 36]), totalling 223 workshop hours, mostly online (97%). The number of workshops conducted by communities other than 'Les Mercredis du CRI' increased steadily over time (see Figure S2 in the online supplemental materials). There was a median of five participants per workshop (range [1, 25]). For participants subscribed before 31 January 2021 (N = 73), 19% joined at least one workshop per month (see Figure S3 in the online supplemental materials).

## Collective research efforts and outputs

The study period started with 22 Challenges, 39 Actions to address them, 49 Feedbacks and 0 Syntheses. The pre-existing objects had been produced during the initial phase of this project and had not been peer-reviewed (see Appendix S6 in the online supplemental
<figure><img src="image_20.png" /><figcaption>Table 1. Description of the Profs-Chercheurs communities created.</figcaption></figure>

<table><thead><tr><th>Community name<sup>a</sup></th><th>Date creation</th><th>N facilitators</th><th>N participants subscribed (have attended workshops)</th><th>N workshops (N hours)</th><th>Median [range] participants per workshop</th><th>Members: shared thematic or context</th><th>All thematics, all contexts</th><th>Institutional support for facilitators to run the community</th><th>Institutional support for participants attendance to workshop</th></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>Les Mercredis du CRI</td><td>30 Sep 2020</td><td>3</td><td>77 (36)</td><td>36 (72.0)</td><td>4.5 [1–9]</td><td></td><td></td><td>Facilitators were part of the research team.</td><td>For 3 and 1 participants, 18 h and 8 h of workshops were counted as a professional development activity.</td></tr><tr><td>DevC_SEGPA</td><td>02 Dec 2020</td><td>4</td><td>13 (10)</td><td>19 (36.0)</td><td>3 [2–10]</td><td>Educators in SEGPA<sup>a</sup> in the same region</td><td>Officially considered as a training activity.</td><td>For all participants, all workshops were counted as a professional development activity.</td><td>For 3 and 1 participants, 18 h and 8 h of workshops were counted as a professional development activity.</td></tr><tr><td>Différencier sans exclure</td><td>4 Dec 2020</td><td>1</td><td>7 (7)</td><td>7 (12.0)</td><td>3 [2–5]</td><td>Educators interested in the thematic of students with special needs</td><td>8 h of workshop was officially considered as a training activity.</td><td>For five participants, 8 h of workshops were counted as a professional development activity.</td><td>For 3 and 1 participants, 18 h and 8 h of workshops were counted as a professional development activity.</td></tr><tr><td>DevC_Communauté</td><td>9 Dec 2020</td><td>3</td><td>8 (7)</td><td>17 (33.0)</td><td>5 [2–7]</td><td>Educators from the same region, all thematics</td><td>Officially considered as a training activity.</td><td>For all participants, all workshops were counted as a professional development activity.</td><td>For 3 and 1 participants, 18 h and 8 h of workshops were counted as a professional development activity.</td></tr><tr><td>Circonscription Agly – Directeurs</td><td>27 Jan 2021</td><td>7</td><td>26 (25)</td><td>21 (32.5)</td><td>5 [2–25]</td><td>Primary school directors from the same district</td><td>Officially considered as a training activity.</td><td>For all participants, all workshops were counted as a professional development activity.</td><td>For 3 and 1 participants, 18 h and 8 h of workshops were counted as a professional development activity.</td></tr><tr><td>DevC_TIERS-LAB</td><td>11 Feb 2021</td><td>3</td><td>10 (10)</td><td>7 (14.0)</td><td>5 [2–6]</td><td>Educators in charge of Fablabs at schools in the same region</td><td>Officially considered as a training activity.</td><td>For all participants, all workshops were counted as a professional development activity.</td><td>For 3 and 1 participants, 18 h and 8 h of workshops were counted as a professional development activity.</td></tr><tr><td>Ecole St-Raphael</td><td>2 Mar 2021</td><td>1</td><td>6 (6)</td><td>1 (2.5)</td><td>6</td><td>Educators from the same primary school</td><td>The facilitator was part of the research team.</td><td>None</td><td>None</td></tr><tr><td>DevC_ROSA-PARKS</td><td>2 Mar 2021</td><td>3</td><td>18 (13)</td><td>8 (16.0)</td><td>6 [2–8]</td><td>Educators from the same secondary school</td><td>Officially considered as a training activity.</td><td>For all participants, all workshops were counted as a professional development activity.</td><td>For 3 and 1 participants, 18 h and 8 h of workshops were counted as a professional development activity.</td></tr></tbody></table>

(Continued)
<figure><img src="image_21.png" /><figcaption>Table 1. (Continued).</figcaption></figure>

<table><thead><tr><th>Community name<sup>a</sup></th><th>Date creation</th><th>N facilitators</th><th>N participants subscribed (have attended workshops)</th><th>N workshops (N hours)</th><th>Median [range] participants per workshop</th><th>Members: shared thematic or context</th><th>Institutional support for facilitators to run the community</th><th>Institutional support for participants attendance to workshop</th></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>DevC_MECA</td><td>21 May 2021</td><td>4</td><td>4 (4)</td><td>1 (2.0)</td><td>5</td><td>Educators from the discipline 'Vehicle and equipment maintenance' in vocational high schools in the same region</td><td>Officially considered as a training activity.</td><td>For all participants, all workshops were counted as a professional development activity.</td></tr><tr><td>SOLALECOLE</td><td>1 Jul 2021</td><td>1</td><td>0</td><td>0 (0.0)</td><td>NA</td><td>Educators from all regions interested in soil education</td><td>None</td><td>None</td></tr><tr><td>InterCommunity Workshops</td><td></td><td></td><td></td><td>1 (3.0)</td><td>11</td><td></td><td></td><td></td></tr></tbody></table>

<footnote><sup>a</sup>In France, SEGPA (Sections d'Enseignement Général et Professionnel Adapté) are classes designed for special needs students, provided by mainstream lower secondary institutions. Most students face major social issues or learning issues (https://www.insee.fr/en/metadonnees/definition/cl/).</footnote>
materials). After one year of collective work, 38 new Challenges were suggested, 48 new Actions were suggested, 20 new Feedback objects were shared or under development, and 0 Synthesis were produced. Most participants (N = 77) joined a single Challenge, 30 worked on two or three Challenges, and seven worked on four or more.

Twenty-three Challenges were peer-reviewed. These Challenges addressed a wide range of topics to support students' development within formal educational institutions (N = 13) and outside formal educational institutions (N = 4), and to support educational institutions themselves through PD and management (N = 6) (Table 2). On average, a new Challenge was suggested after three new participants began joining workshops. We expected that by the end of the year new participants would find more often in the platform an existing Challenge grasping their concerns as compared to the beginning of the year. However, this was not the case (see Figure S4 in the online supplemental materials). This suggests that the database of Challenges is not yet sufficiently large to encompass all concerns of educators in France.

By July 2021, nine Challenges had at least one peer-reviewed Action, and a unique Challenge (the one described below) had at least one peer-reviewed Feedback. Challenge descriptions were sent to peer review after a median of three workshops (range [1, 8]), and Actions after seven workshops (range [5, 9]). For the unique Challenge with peer-reviewed Feedback objects, 19 workshops (38 workshop hours) were conducted before reaching that stage of advancement. Participants started reporting their observations as Feedback only after five months of regular work (Figure 3). This is reasonable as some cumulative work is needed to formulate Challenges and Actions, to implement new strategies and to collect and analyse contextualised evidence.

## Collaboration

Participants were able to work together on common Challenges despite having different roles or working in different geographical areas. A median of three educators (range [1, 10]) joined each Challenge. In half (51%) of the Challenges, the coauthors were educators with different roles in education (e.g., primary *and* secondary school teachers, or primary school teachers *and* teacher trainers). In 42% of the Challenges, the coauthors were educators from different geographical departments. Half of the participants (54%) joined a Challenge that was initiated by someone else.

## Challenge example – how to help a disruptive student control his or her violent outbursts?

We provide here a short narrative of the work conducted by a group of educators who joined the programme at its beginning and provided the largest amount of effort on a Challenge. The objective is to show an illustrative example of how the Profs-Chercheurs programme engaged educators to produce structured practice-based evidence.

Ms A, a primary school teacher from the Parisian suburbs, joined one of the first workshops of 'Les Mercredis du CRI' in October 2020. She came following the recommendation of her district manager, who was in contact with the research team. She suggested a new Challenge entitled 'How to help a disruptive student control his or her violent outbursts?' A couple of weeks later, Mr B, a secondary school teacher from
<figure><img src="image_22.png" /></figure>

another French region who discovered the programme through social media, joined a 'Les Mercredis du CRI' workshop. He saw the Challenge and shared with the facilitators his interest to work on it. He was guided during that workshop to contribute to the written description of the Challenge, thus building upon the work previously done by Ms A.

Ms A invited two colleagues (Ms C and Ms D) to join workshops to work on that same Challenge. They benefited from the support of their district manager to count 18 hours of workshop attendance as part of their mandatory yearly PD. Mr B continued coming to workshops more than twice a month during his free time. These four participants constituted a core group that regularly joined workshops to work on that specific Challenge, even if the four of them were not simultaneously present in all workshops. Three additional occasional contributors from other French regions joined workshops to collaborate with the core group at different stages of the research. In total, 23 workshops (corresponding to 46 hours of work) included activities related to this Challenge.

After six workshops (12 hours) done over two months, the description of the Challenge was finalised, peer-reviewed and improved, and educators started suggesting Actions. Three Actions were described and subsequently peer-reviewed: an observation-based Action entitled 'Identifying the triggers of disruptive behaviours', and two others entitled 'Establishing a contract with the disruptive student' and 'Reinforcing the positive behaviour (opposite to the disruptive one)'. Between February and March 2021, the core group and an occasional contributor (Ms E) planned the implementation of one of these Actions and produced 'field notes' to guide their contextualised observations of variables such as the number of disruptive events caused by the student, the perceived intensity of that disruptive event or the time without any disruptive behaviour during a session. Observations were planned at different paces according to each other's contexts (every day, once or twice a week in a specific time slot, or each time an event occurred). Starting mid-March 2021, the core group provided Feedbacks which were peer-reviewed.

The Action entitled 'Identifying the triggers of disruptive behaviours' received two Feedbacks from Ms A and Mr B. Both concluded that simply observing did not help improve their challenging situation. However, both reported that observing helped them better understand the underlying causes of disruptive behaviours, which may help them better design targeted interventions to decrease them. Both provided as supplementary material the observations collected to support their claims. The Action entitled 'Establishing a contract with the disruptive student' received Feedback from Ms C and Ms D, who respectively concluded that implementing that Action helped 'a little' and 'sufficiently' in addressing their challenging situation. They did not provide the data they had planned to collect to support their claims. Additionally, Ms E prepared to implement the Actions entitled 'Establishing a contract with the disruptive student' and 'Reinforcing the positive behaviour (opposite to the disruptive one)' but did not provide Feedback.

To reach the Feedback stage, Ms A, C and D spent between 12 and 16 hours in workshops to describe the Challenge, the Actions and produce the Feedback (not counting peer-reviews), and Mr B spent 22 hours in workshops. When counting the time spent in contributing to others' work (e.g., through peer-review), Ms A, C and D spent between 16 and 18 hours in workshops, and Mr B a total of 38 hours. This does not take into account the extra time spent by educators outside workshops (e.g., experimenting and collecting data in their classroom).
<figure><img src="image_23.png" /><figcaption>Table 2. Categories of the peer-reviewed Challenges (N = 23).</figcaption></figure>

<table><thead><tr><th>Categories</th><th>Number of Challenges</th></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>Theme: Supporting student development</td><td></td></tr><tr><td>Sub-theme: Within formal educational institutions</td><td></td></tr><tr><td>Adaptation/differentiation for students with special needs</td><td>4</td></tr><tr><td>Student assessment</td><td>2</td></tr><tr><td>Students' critical thinking</td><td>1</td></tr><tr><td>Students' emotions</td><td>4</td></tr><tr><td>Distance education</td><td>2</td></tr><tr><td>Total sub-themes</td><td>13</td></tr><tr><td>Sub-theme: Outside formal educational institutions</td><td></td></tr><tr><td>Link between educational institution and families</td><td>2</td></tr><tr><td>Link between formal education and professional life</td><td>2</td></tr><tr><td>Total sub-themes</td><td>4</td></tr><tr><td>Total themes</td><td>17</td></tr><tr><td>Theme: Supporting educational institutions</td><td></td></tr><tr><td>Professional development of educators</td><td>3</td></tr><tr><td>Management of educational institutions</td><td>3</td></tr><tr><td>Total themes</td><td>6</td></tr></tbody></table>

Reviewed Challenges targeted primary school only (N = 3), secondary school only (N = 2), both primary and secondary school (N = 12), and altogether primary, secondary and higher education (N = 6).

This collective work was presented by members of the core group during a research colloquium (Benomar et al. 2021). All written descriptions, supporting material and peer-review reports are made publicly available by coauthors in the Challenge page: https://plateforme.profschercheurs.org/projects/l8BgzsdU.

## Discussion

We presented a citizen science project to build a community of educators akin to a scientific community, publishing structured practice-based evidence. Guided during workshops by the research team and trained facilitators, volunteer educators described common Challenges, identified possible Actions to address them, shared Feedback reporting practice-based evidence on the observed effects of each Action and peer-reviewed each other's work. Their collective work was made public in a collaborative publication platform. A total of 127 educators across France (and abroad) including primary, secondary and university teachers, school staff and researchers joined at least one of the 118 workshops (223 workshop hours) that were offered. Sixty Challenges ranging from the improvement of instructional strategies to school management were published.

We argue the Profs-Chercheurs programme has the potential to build a knowledge base for educators by engaging a high number of educators in the creation of a database of practice-based evidence that is of quality, transferable, accessible, and over which relevant cases are easy to identify. To ensure the quality of practice-based evidence, the Profs-Chercheurs programme guides educators to apply research principles to inquire on their practices. It also guides them to do a complete reporting of their research through dedicated templates, and a peer-review system provides checks at all stages of the research cycle. Avoiding bias is a big concern in research. As with research practice generally, participants may need to accumulate first-person experience to develop a critical eye and get confident in using research methods. Nonetheless, research
<figure><img src="image_24.png" /></figure>

<figure><img src="image_25.png" /><figcaption>**Figure 3.** Workshop activities per Challenge. Activity per Challenge on time: each line represents a Challenge, each dot represents a workshop (generally two hours long) addressing that Challenge, and the colour represents the activity of the Profs-Chercheurs methodology conducted. The participants working on the same Challenge are not necessarily the same for all workshops, and one participant may have joined workshops addressing different Challenges.</figcaption></figure>

protocols must not become a burden for educators, lest they become demotivated. In the Challenge example we described in detail, two educators did not share the data they planned to collect, maybe because collecting and sharing it was burdensome. Not having that data as a support may decrease the confidence others have in their conclusions. However, this was the only Challenge with finalised Feedback. We do not know at this stage whether the lack of data collection and sharing to support Feedback is a common pattern across educators. If that was the case, further work would be needed to understand the barriers and leverages for data collection and sharing by educators, but also to examine the different research designs used by educators, and to assess how the different designs and levels of reporting may affect others' confidence in Feedback conclusions.

To ensure the transferability of practice-based evidence, it is important to define Actions that are shareable so that different educators could provide contextualised Feedback for the same Action. If a Feedback is compelling for educators, the description of the corresponding Action will provide them with the details of implementation. The peer-review system contributes to ensuring this transferability by explicitly questioning reviewers about the capacity for a given Action to be implemented in different contexts.

The shortcomings of accessibility are addressed mainly through the peer-review system and the publication platform. First, content written and peer-reviewed by educators may have higher chances of being understood by other educators as opposed to content written by actors removed from the practice (e.g., scholars). Second, through the publication platform, educators' research becomes accessible to others in a centralised place. More than half of participants contributed to a Challenge that was initiated by others, attesting to the usefulness for educators to have access to the (ongoing) research conducted by others.
To help educators identify relevant case studies to inform their practice, we suggest an indexing of practice-based evidence (Feedback) based on educational concerns (Challenges) and possible strategies to deal with them (Actions). By design, the Feedback from all educators who are experimenting Actions targeting the same Challenge will be linked in the database. This feature allows the evidence produced to be more easily compared, aggregated and synthesised than if we merely collected a large list of independent reports. Starting the indexing procedure from common Challenges is in line with Kennedy's (2016, 10) proposal to parse teaching practice 'focusing on challenges, rather than on solutions, [to] help [teachers] learn to think strategically about how their actions address a larger purpose'. Other educational stakeholders, while potentially collaborating with teachers to address their challenges, are confronted with other kinds of concerns for which they need professional knowledge (e.g., school management). Without having an exhaustive taxonomy of educators' challenges, we used a bottom-up approach for indexing: educators suggest new Challenges if they do not appear in the database. Thanks to peer-review, Challenges are organically collapsed, reformulated, narrowed down or expanded to make sure they are general enough for others to feel concerned about them, but specific enough to call for concrete Actions.

Finally, we suggest that several features of the Profs-Chercheurs programme contribute to engaging educators in the creation of practice-based evidence. We discuss them through the lenses of the three basic psychological needs from self-determination theory: autonomy, competence and relatedness (Ryan and Deci 2000). First, educators may be more motivated as they can be autonomous in defining their own research question and protocol from their own concerns and practices. Second, motivation may be enhanced as educators are considered as having the competencies required to be active inquirers of their practices. Acknowledging workshop participation as a PD activity contributes in this direction. The platform may also increase educators' professional reputation as publishing their work may attract attention from others. Third, the Profs-Chercheurs programme may contribute to educators' relatedness within professional communities. During workshops, educators can share with their peers their concerns in an atmosphere of mutual trust and respect, which can support them to process new understandings and develop new perspectives (Timperley et al. 2007).

This study was limited by the uneven engagement of participants with the Profs-Chercheurs programme. Additional work is needed to better understand participants' reasons leading to an increase or decrease in engagement over time. Furthermore, participants' engagement may not be operationalised solely based on workshop attendance, but could include participants' actual conduct of the different steps of their research, namely including experimentation of Actions and data collection. For instance, as described in the Challenge example, some participants did not share evidence to support their Feedback, maybe because they did not engage in data collection. Further work is needed to understand the possible disengagement of participants in the different stages of the research cycle. Nonetheless, the division of the research cycle into independent activities through the Profs-Chercheurs methodology allows the collective research effort to advance even if a high proportion of educators join workshops only occasionally. For instance, in the Challenge example detailed above, the research efforts were not conducted solely by the core group of teachers. Other participants occasionally contributed to the collective efforts, e.g., by
<figure><img src="image_26.png" /></figure>

helping the core group with the description of the Challenge or Actions, or through peer-review. In addition, one participant (Ms E) who felt concerned about the Challenge prepared to implement Actions which were described and published by other educators prior to her. Thus, she benefited from the collective research efforts to advance more quickly through her research. In contexts of scarce time for professional development activities, educators may build upon the collective efforts to reach advanced research stages, potentially diminishing the amount of engagement needed to produce and share meaningful practice-based evidence with others.

By the end of this first year of implementation, no Synthesis of Feedback was produced. Indeed, the collective efforts led to a single Challenge with finalised Feedback (the Challenge example detailed above) and a maximum of two Feedbacks for the same Action. Furthermore, most of the Feedbacks for that Challenge were produced by teachers working in the same context. The amount of Feedback available and the diversity of contexts were too limited to undergo a Synthesis with a compelling comparison concerning, e.g., the capacity of 'Establishing a contract with the disruptive student' to meet the Challenge 'How to help a disruptive student control his or her violent outbursts?' Further teachers engaged in that Challenge towards the sharing of Feedback are needed to produce such Syntheses.

The term *citizen science* in the educational scientific literature has been coined mostly in relation with the capacity of citizen science projects to promote learning (Phillips et al. 2018). In this work, we suggest using the term citizen science as a methodological framework to conduct research about teaching and learning. It has been rarely used in this context (Letang et al. 2021), probably because of the longstanding history of participatory approaches in educational sciences as compared to natural sciences, in which the concept of citizen science has been mostly used (Tauginienė et al. 2020). We think the Profs-Chercheurs programme should be considered a citizen science project because, in addition to the inclusion of educators in all the stages of the scientific process, it is designed to lead to new knowledge and to improve our understanding on how to address the challenges of education (Robinson et al. 2018). Furthermore, research-practice partnerships could be hosted within the Profs-Chercheurs programme (Coburn, Penuel, and Geil 2013). Researchers who are specialists in a particular topic may join workshops or conduct peer reviews to help educators in their research. This was the case for one Challenge concerning the promotion of students' collaboration, where facilitators invited a French researcher specialist in that topic to peer-review their work.

In conclusion, we developed a citizen science project that engaged educators in a collective research enterprise about their practices. It allowed the publication of contextualised practice-based evidence from different educators experimenting towards common goals. Further work is needed to understand how to increase the engagement of educators in the production of practice-based evidence, how to improve the quality of the evidence produced and how such evidence could be effectively used by educators to inform their practices.

## Acknowledgments

We would like to thank the Collaboratory from the Learning Planet Institute that contributed to the early, mid and later stages of the development of this project. We would also like to thank Ariel
Lindner, François Taddei, Philippe Parmentier and Denis Bédard for their comments and discussions about this work. We would also like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their comments and suggestions which improved the quality of this article.

We would like to thank all educators that have supported or joined the Profs-Chercheurs programme. The following educators explicitly provided consent to be acknowledged in this manuscript: Alex Pons, Amandine Molinier, Anne Sierri, Annie Gelineau, Arnaud Chambon, Barbara François, Beatrice Cheutin, Carole Correge, Caroline Nograbat, Catherine Pales, Cédric Duffort, Céline Ferrasse-Courtiol, Christophe Buczkowski, Claire Bogdanovitch, Claire Buisson, Claire de Chessé, Denis Chadebec, Dominique Monier, Elodie Camo, Elsa Chusseau, Fabienne Giamarchi, Flora Baret, Florence Conrozier, Grégory Lefevre, Guillaume Laffitte, Jean Michel Magot, Jean-Paul Rullmann, Kévin de Checchi, Lara Pierquin-Rifflet, Laurent Brisot, Laurent Campoy, Marie Polge, Marine Lanteri, Michaël Boumediene, Nassima Mezouar, Nicolas Barthélemy, Nicolas Tessier, Patricia Jouault, Rhab Khessiba, Sébastien Martos, Serge di Venanzio, Sophie Raisin, Stéphanie Huguenotte, Sylvain Amiel.

## Disclosure statement

Members of the research team were partly financed through the Learning Planet Institute during this work, which provides the creation and facilitation of communities following the Profs-Chercheurs methodology as a paid service.

## Funding

Thanks to the Bettencourt Schueller Foundation long-term partnership, this work was partly supported by a Research Fellowship awarded to Ignacio Atal. This work has also received support under the programme 'Investissements d'Avenir' launched by the French Government and implemented by ANR with the references [ANR-17-EURE-0017] and [ANR-10-IDEX-0001-02 PSL]. A CC-BY public copyright licence has been applied by the authors to the present document and will be applied to all subsequent versions up to the Author Accepted Manuscript arising from this submission, in accordance with the grant's open access conditions.

## Notes on contributors

Ignacio Atal is a post-doctoral researcher at LaRAC (Laboratory for research in Acquisitions in Context), Université Grenoble Alpes, France. His research interests include evidence-based education, meta-analyses, citizen science and collaborative research. ORCID ID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7323-6511.

Nathanaël Jeune is a teaching and research assistant at LaRAC (Laboratory for research in Acquisitions in Context), Université Grenoble Alpes, France. Their research interests include collaborative research in education, especially research-practice partnerships, philosophy of education, teaching critical thinking and critical discourse studies. https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0835-5845.

Carole Gabard is a primary school teacher in the Vendée region, France. Her main interests are cognitive sciences and teaching methods aiming at improving students’ well-being and self-awareness in learning experiences.

Philippe Dessus is a full professor in Educational Sciences and a member of the LaRAC (Laboratory for research in Acquisitions in Context), Université Grenoble Alpes, France. His research focuses on building and validating computer-based systems which deliver automated feedback for learning, in diverse contexts like text writing or reading. He is also working on teachers’ cognition, related to planning and interactive phases, and specialises in the use of the Classroom Assessment Scoring System. More recently he is working on context-aware classrooms to capture and analyse
<figure><img src="image_27.png" /></figure>

multimodal information on learning and teaching events. ORCID ID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6076-5150.

*Murillo Pagnotta* is a post-doctoral researcher at the Department of Linguistics, Cognitive Science, and Semiotics, Aarhus University, Denmark. His research interests include social learning, embodied cognition, developmental systems theory, and critiques of the nature–culture distinction. ORCID ID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2276-0935.

## Ethical committee approval

This work was not submitted to an ethics committee during the first year of implementation reported in this manuscript, as the entire protocol of the Profs-Chercheurs programme was not ready before we started recruiting participants in September 2020. At sign-up, participants voluntarily chose to be included or not in this cohort study. Subsequent and similar studies reporting the implementation of the Profs-Chercheurs programme from September 2021 onwards received approval from the INSERM ethical committee (IRB00003888, IORG0003254, FWA00005831).

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