Is science communication training effective? Integrating research into practice

Author: Yael Barel-Ben David – Technion – Israel Institute of Technology, Israel

Co-authors:
Ayelet Baram-Tsabari – Faculty of Education in Science and Technology Technion, Israel Institute of Technology
John C. Besley – Michigan State University
Dacia Herbulock – Science Media Centre, New Zealand

Demand for science communication training has soared in recent years, as scientists and institutions recognize the need for science to be more relevant to society. However, many training programs operate in isolation from each other and from communication researchers, which has tended to broaden the gap between research and practice. Hence, training programs are only loosely grounded in empirical studies, and we lack a coherent framework for assessing performance and integrating new learning.

From this gap emerged a need to implement research-based assessment and improvements into professional practice and the other way around, also known as Research-Practice Partnerships (RPPs). These partnerships are a two-way street, bringing research and empirical results into the practice of science communication (scicomm) training, as well as bringing the needs rising from the field of practice into the research agenda.

This group paper presents four studies: first, a collaboration between the Alan Alda Center for Communicating Science and Technion researchers addressing both participants’ and practitioners’ input in assessing the goals and effectiveness of the programs; next, an evaluation of long-term impacts from the New Zealand Science Media Centre’s range of training programs for scientists, from multi-day intensive courses to one-on-one micro (15 min.) sessions; an examination of US scientists’ views on what science communication training should address, and finally, empirical results on the effect of scicomm intervention on Israeli early career scientists’ popular and academic writing skills. Altogether, these studies lay out research-based insights that could be used to establish evidenced-based pedagogy in scicomm trainings. We will address questions of integrating research based insights into practice and vice versa, aiming to create robust Researcher-Practitioner Partnerships.

The author has not yet submitted a copy of the full paper.

Presentation type: Grouped paper
Theme: Science
Area of interest: Applying science communication research to practice

Author: Yael Barel-Ben David – Technion – Israel Institute of Technology, Israel

Co-authors:
Ayelet Baram-Tsabari – Faculty of Education in Science and Technology Technion – Israel Institute of Technology
Erez Garty – Davidson Institute – the Educational Arm of the Weizmann Institute of Science

In many countries the public’s main source of information about science and technology is the mass media. Unfortunately, in recent years we witness the collapse of traditional journalism all over the world with science journalism being a major casualty. One potential remedy is to encourage scientists to write for news media about science. On these general news platforms scientists’ stories compete for attention with other news stories on hard (e.g. politics) and entertaining (e.g. celebrity news) topics written by professional writers. Do they stand a chance?

In this research project we ask: when published on the same platform, is there a difference in public’s engagement with science items written by scientists and general items written by the website’s organic reporters? To measures users’ behavior, we used data from Google Analytics on number of clicks, likes, comments etc. The sample included 200 science items written by 30 graduate STEM students trained to contribute popular science stories at the Davidson Institute of Science Education reporters program and published on two major Israeli news websites – ‘Mako’ and ‘Ynet’ between July 2015 to August 2017 and January 2016 to August 2017, respectively. Each science item was matched with another item on various topics, written by the websites organic reporters, and published on the same channel as the science story (e.g., tourism, health) and more or less at the same time (+/- 3 days of publication).

Based on preliminary results of 67 paired news items of the 200 collected, no significant difference in the public’s engagement between the different items was found: people did not click, liked or commented more on general stories than on the science stories written by scientists. Full analysis will be presented at the conference.

The author has not yet submitted a copy of the full paper.

Presentation type: Individual paper
Theme: Science
Area of interest: Investigating science communication practices