van den Sanden and Vries curate reflections and insights about the shared goals, practices and processes which bring together academics and practitioners in science education and communication. The book spotlights areas of productive overlap but is just the beginning for meaningful collaboration.
Englehard et al provide a wide-ranging look at synthetic biology, from discussion of how one might classify different synthetic approaches to consideration of risk and ethical issues. The chapter on public engagement considers why synthetic biology seems to sit below the public radar.
This letter reflects on how the role of science in society evolved in 2016. While there were plenty of groundbreaking scientific discoveries, the shifting political landscape cultivated a tempestuous relationship between science and society. We discuss these developments and the potential role of the science communication community in political activism.
This article proposes a classification of the current differences between online videos produced specifically for television and online videos produced for the Internet, based on online audiovisual production on climate change. The classification, which consists of 18 formats divided into two groups that allow comparisons to be made between television and web formats, was created through the quantitative and qualitative content analysis of a sample of 300 videos. The findings show that online video's capacity to generate visits is greater when it has been designed to be broadcast on the
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Alicia de Lara GonzalezJose Garcia-AvilesGema Revuelta
This paper provides an analysis of the implementation and the outcomes of Scienza Attiva, an Italian national project for secondary school students, that makes use of deliberative democracy tools to address socio-scientific issues of great impact. The analysis has required a mixed method including surveys of students' pre- and post-project opinions, focus groups and interviews with students and teachers. The results from this evaluation study provide evidence that the project improves students' understanding of socio-scientific issues, strengthens their awareness of the importance of
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Federica CornaliGianfranco PomattoSelena Agnella
Citizen science continues to grow, potentially increasing competition among projects to recruit and retain volunteers interested in participating. Using web analytics, we examined the ability of a marketing campaign to broaden project awareness, while driving engagement and retention in an online, crowdsourced project. The campaign challenged audiences to support the classification of >9,000 pairs of images. The campaign was successful due to increased engagement, but it did not increase the time participants spent classifying images. Engagement over multiple days was significantly shorter
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Alycia CrallMargaret KosmalaRebecca ChengJonathan BrierDarlene CavalierSandra HendersonAndrew Richardson
The most important consideration in evaluating chemistry outreach efforts is how to best use the evaluation to serve project needs. Evaluation should be about making programs more effective—at communicating ideas, changing attitudes, inspiring action, or reaching wider audiences, for example. A well-conducted evaluation typically contributes to the quality of a project by helping its leaders better define their goals, identify important milestones and indicators of success, and use evidence to support ongoing improvements. At its best, evaluation is an integral part of project design and
Informal learning opportunities are increasingly being recognized as important for youth participation in authentic experiences at the intersection of science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) (Dorsen, Carlson, and Goodyear 2006). These experiences may involve specialized equipment and dedicated time for learners to gain familiarity with the relevant scientific and engineering practices (i.e., designing experiments on their own, struggling to make sense of data, learning from their own mistakes and the results of peers), which often go beyond the classroom. However, the educators who
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Kathryn WilliamsonSue Ann HeatherlyVivian HoetteEva Erdosne TothDavid Beer
Many people believe that both public policy and personal action would improve with better access to “reliable knowledge about the natural world” (that thing that we often call science). Many of those people participate in science education and science communication. And yet, both as areas of practice and as objects of academic inquiry, science education and science communication have until recently remained remarkably distinct. Why, and what resources do the articles in this special issue of JRST give us for bringing together both the fields of practice and the fields of inquiry?
The fields of science education and science communication share the overarching goal of helping non-experts and non-members of the professional science community develop knowledge of the content and processes of scientific research. However, the specific audiences, methods, and aims employed in the two fields have evolved quite differently and as a result, the two fields rarely share findings and theory. Despite this lack of crosstalk, one theoretical construct—framing—has shown substantial analytic power for researchers in both fields. Specifically, both fields have productively made use of
In the 1920s, John Dewey and Walter Lippmann both wrote important books examining whether the public was capable of playing a constructive role in policy, particularly when specialized knowledge was involved. This essay uses the Lippmann–Dewey debate to identify new challenges for science education and to explore the relationship between science education and science communication. It argues that science education can help foster democracy in ways that embody Habermas' ideal of the public sphere, but only if we as a field pay more attention to (1) the non-scientific frames and narratives that
In some senses, both science education and science communication share common goals. Both seek to educate, entertain and engage the public with and about science. Somewhat surprisingly, given their common goals, they have evolved as disparate academic fields where each pays little attention to the other.1 The purpose of this special issue, therefore, is an attempt some form of rapprochement—to contribute to building a better awareness of what each has to contribute to the other and the value of the scholarship conducted in both fields.