Determining the willingness to pay for ecosystem service restoration in a degraded coastal watershed: A ninth grade investigation

Over the course of a school year, a high school biology class and a local watershed partnership worked together to design a study to determine the willingness to pay for ecosystem service restoration in a local degraded watershed. With research control given to the teacher and her classroom as part of their in-class honors biology curriculum, the result was a student designed/written, and professionally structured, research manuscript. The aim of this collaboration was to: (1) integrate quantitative social science into the K-12 science curriculum to foster learning about the nature of social science investigation in a real world context; (2) create a community-based science partnership; and (3) generate social science data useful for decision-making that could withstand scientific peer review. In this commentary, we present the written product of the classrooms' work to illustrate the type of information that can be generated by a participatory science education program, along with a reflection from the students and project researchers about opportunities and barriers to conducting authentic social science research in K-12 classrooms.