Tuesday, August 9, 2016
Georgia Ballroom (Sheraton Hotel Atlanta)
Being able to effectively describe one’s research interests to a broad audience is an incredibly important skill that students in the sciences often lack. This is because many students rarely have the opportunity to receive formal training to become an advocate for their subject of interest. We were interested in determining whether formal training in science communication helped graduate students improve their confidence and proficiency in communicating their dissertation research to a general audience. In Fall 2015, we designed and taught a new graduate-level course called “Communicating Science,” in which students learned different techniques to convey their research to a general audience using a variety of different methods (including elevator speeches, press releases, and social media). This course culminated with a “Student Science Series” night, a free event open to the local community in which students delivered short presentations on their research and fielded questions from the audience. We conducted a survey with students from a wide range of life science disciplines, including those who had taken our science communication course. In the survey, we asked students to respond to a series of prompts that assessed their ability to communicate scientific concepts to a lay audience (use of jargon, clear delivery of messages, appropriate analogies, etc.). We analyzed responses to measure if our former students showed an increased aptitude for communicating science when compared to students who did not enroll in our class. While this survey showed that students exhibited a wide range in proficiency for communicating science, we confirmed that our former students strongly felt that their enrollment in our course was largely helpful in improving their ability to communicate with the public. We therefore conclude that providing formal training in science communication can be extremely useful for graduate students’ professional development.