in Science Communication in December<\/a>, were not what the researchers expected. Not only did the graduate students who took the science communication course not improve, but the audience themselves did not agree about who was, and was not, a good communicator.<\/p>\n\u201cHow do you measure effective communication? It\u2019s hard, so context specific,\u201d says Oeldorf-Hirsch. She points out that there are many goals you can have for a specific message. Do you want the listener to remember it? Like it? Understand it? Do you want to persuade them? For the purposes of the study, the team decided to have the undergrad judges focus on just three things: the speaker\u2019s clarity, trustworthiness and engagement.<\/p>\n
But even for those simple goals, the audience did not agree. Even the graduate student with the highest average rating was scored low by some reviewers, and the graduate student with the lowest average rating still received some high scores.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe went into this thinking we\u2019d get an answer,\u201d to whether the class was working, but \u201cinstead, we found a whole mound of complexities,\u201d says Wyss.<\/p>\n
They have lots of questions about the meaning of the results. One guess is that a one-semester course just doesn\u2019t provide enough time, or practice, to improve working communication skills.<\/p>\n
\u201cNobody masters a complex skill in six months. It takes time and practice; you have to do it over and over again,\u201d says Capers.<\/p>\n
Oeldorf-Hirsch says it may also be that there are unique challenges to communicating about science. Or that we aren\u2019t measuring the right things. One thing is sure; if the semester-long class with multiple opportunities to practice science communication is not effective, the many two-hour or day-long seminars on science communication are probably not any better, at least as standalone classes.<\/p>\n
But that\u2019s not to say they are useless, either.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe don’t believe for a minute that students in our classes learn nothing,\u201d Rubega says. \u201cIt is clear from their performance in class that they know a lot about the pitfalls of communicating to public audiences, and the theory of what successful communication should look like. What our study shows is that knowing about it, and being able to actually communicate successfully with an audience, are different.\u201d The other researchers agree. And they\u2019re also investigating now whether written communication is different than spoken; they\u2019re still evaluating results from a different class on writing about science.<\/p>\n
And if the effectiveness of a class is measured by the outcomes, the science communication class has had some pretty good ones. Take Kevin Burgio, who worked as a post doc on this study. He took the science communication class as an undergrad in 2009, and then several times as a graduate student. He subsequently published a science story he began writing in class through a syndication service and participated in a science storytelling workshop in 2018. And now he\u2019s the Director of Conservation Science at the New York City Audubon, a role that requires significant outreach to the public about science.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
How do you measure the success of a science communication class? The answer is more complex than it may seem.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":79,"featured_media":169900,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"wds_primary_category":0,"wds_primary_series":0,"wds_primary_attribution":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2226,2317,2076,2235,2225],"tags":[],"magazine-issues":[],"coauthors":[1899],"class_list":["post-169797","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-clas","category-journalism","category-research","category-today-homepage","category-uconn-storrs"],"pp_statuses_selecting_workflow":false,"pp_workflow_action":"current","pp_status_selection":"publish","acf":[],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-07-19 12:13:53","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/169797","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/users\/79"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=169797"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/169797\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":169901,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/169797\/revisions\/169901"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/media\/169900"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=169797"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=169797"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=169797"},{"taxonomy":"magazine-issue","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/magazine-issues?post=169797"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=169797"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}