Engaging science and engineering graduate students with informal science education

Abstract

Having effective interactions with public audiences about science and engineering topics is challenging. Many training workshops, boot camps, and courses have tried to address this by training professional scientists and engineers using a variety of strategies; unfortunately, the literature on the effectiveness of these approaches is sparse. We present assessment and evaluation results from a course, "Informal Science Education for Scientists: A Practicum," taught to graduate students in science and engineering-related disciplines in Spring 2008. This course provides a structured framework and experiential learning on informal science education for the graduate student participants during a semester-long experience. The iterative nature of designing an effective informal science education product and the importance of front-end, formative and summative evaluation are stressed throughout the course. The emphasis is placed on having students use a scientific approach in the evaluation of their product to determine if it was effective. Our results show positive outcomes related to changes in student perception of their communication skills, changes in student perceptions of audience, changes in student perception of their evaluation skills, and increased student understanding of the iterative nature of design processes. © American Society for Engineering Education, 2009.