NRT-IGE: A test bed for STEM graduate student communication training

University Of Missouri-Columbia, Columbia MO

Investigators

Abstract

NRT-IGE: A test bed for STEM graduate student communication training Scientists are often criticized for not engaging more with the general public, causing a widening gap between what scientists do in the lab and what the lay public understands about science. Most scientists are not trained with communication skills that would help them engage with the general public. This National Science Foundation Research Traineeship (NRT) award in the Innovations of Graduate Education (IGE) Track to the University of Missouri-Columbia will seek to remedy this problem by investigating communication training for graduate students and developing ways to assure its effectiveness. This project brings together a highly interdisciplinary team from biology, physics, strategic communication, journalism, theater, creative writing, and visual design to develop and test the means of evaluating the effectiveness of communication training in graduate programs. The novel pilot will draw on communication research outside the sciences and use statistical evaluation of training effectiveness from multiple points of view, including the public's. The project will result in tools and procedures graduate training programs could use to assure the quality of communications training, and eventually provide better communication between scientists and others. Despite widespread agreement on the need for better science communication and a proliferation of training programs, there is little evidence about what approaches actually improve scientists' communication skills. An interdisciplinary team will develop a controlled test bed for communication training in science graduate programs. Longitudinal studies will assess trainees' acquisition and retention over five learning modules. A rigorous statistical design will relate trainees' self-evaluations and instructors' evaluations to responses to survey instruments by hundreds of non-science audience members. Statistical comparison of pre-, post-, and no-training impacts on audiences will establish effectiveness. Trainees will come from the life sciences and later from physical sciences to determine the program's transferability among disciplines. These experiments will provide an innovative model for training evaluation that can be adopted by other programs at relatively low cost. The NSF Research Traineeship (NRT) Program is designed to encourage the development and implementation of bold, new, potentially transformative, and scalable models for STEM graduate education training. The Innovations in Graduate Education Track is dedicated solely to piloting, testing, and evaluating novel, innovative, and potentially transformative approaches to graduate education. This work is supported, in part, by the EHR Core Research (ECR) program. The ECR program emphasizes fundamental STEM education research that generates foundational knowledge in the field. Investments are made in critical areas that are essential, broad and enduring: STEM learning and STEM learning environments, broadening participation in STEM, and STEM workforce development.