NRT-IGE: Training STEM Graduates to Communicate in the Digital Age and Measuring Whether it Works.
The grand challenges in science and engineering require broad professional training for graduate students so they have the skills to successfully communicate technical concepts to diverse audiences. Scientists need to be able to talk with policymakers if public funding of science is to yield benefits to society, and they need to talk with commercial partners to create opportunities for innovation. They need to talk with journalists to keep the public informed. Accordingly, science communication training is increasingly integrated into graduate science education, but there are few methods for determining whether training actually works or whether some training programs work better than others. This National Science Foundation Research Traineeship (NRT) award in the Innovations in Graduate Education (IGE) Track to the University of Connecticut will develop and test tools to measure whether training in science communication works and to test which methods work best. The innovative pilot will pair science graduate students with journalism majors and include communication skills training in traditional, digital, and social media. The project will bridge disciplines and create assessment tools that can be used across the graduate education community.
The project will develop and test new teaching materials and new innovative tools to evaluate whether the model succeeds in increasing communication effectiveness and activity among science, math, and engineering students. During the pilot, young scientists will be paired with journalists to engage in an interview-write-assess-repeat model. The project will utilize publicly available social media data and evaluations provided by undergraduate students to assess the participating graduate students' effectiveness as communicators. These data will permit comparisons of students before and after training and comparisons of traditional assessment methods with those provided through social media analytics. Social media metrics may also provide a cost- and labor-effective means to track trainees over the course of their careers. The assessment tools developed and tested in this project will be transferable across disciplines and universities, for the first time permitting cost-benefit comparisons among programs using different training strategies.
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.
