Projects

SciComm LIFT: Leveraging Institutional capacity for eFfective graduate student Training

By Bethann Merkle, PI

Communication is the top job skill required across all sectors, and ethical science communication (scicomm) helps scientists identify and engage with the values, needs, and diverse ways of knowing of people ranging from community members to policy makers. Graduate students themselves have identified the need for training in these translational skills before embarking on their post-graduation careers.
SciComm LIFT uses expectancy values theory to address three issues:

  1. Most scicomm training programs prioritize knowledge gains and skills, but ignore the human/ethical elements of scicomm that are vital to science that fosters public trust;
  2. Existing scicomm training is rarely assessed, making it difficult for trainers and programs to optimize programming and demonstrate its efficacy;
  3. Long-standing, systemic barriers impede integration of ethical scicomm training.

 

 

Read the abstract
UW College of Agriculture and Natural Resources Project Report

Aim 1, SciComm LIFT will conduct a broadly distributed, systems-scoping survey (Motivations to Engage in Scicomm Advancement; MESA) of graduate students, faculty, and staff to

  1. Assess current knowledge, motivations, and self-efficacy around ethical scicomm and
  2. Quantify the extent of training addressing ethical dimensions of scicomm. MESA will be made available to the research and graduate education community as a validated, reliable instrument tested across contexts and institutions.

Aim 2 is a multi-institutional study to gauge the impact of three ethical scicomm interventions in graduate programs, which will provide much-needed data that can be used to calibrate scicomm training programs nationwide.

Aim 3 investigates how three levels of coaching can support academic faculty and staff to overcome institutional barriers preventing them from offering ethical scicomm training to graduate students.