Teaching Science Communication
Experiences from Psychology
Identifiers (Article)
Abstract
Communicating scientific findings to the general public is an important part of universities’ third mission. While the need for communicating research is amounting, university graduates hardly receive any training and are thus not well prepared to meet this challenge, be it as a researcher (e. g. during a PhD) or in the applied field of their studies. To address this gap, I have incorporated science communication training into my teaching and developed dedicated science communication courses for Psychology students. This paper focuses on a course on “Communicating Findings from Developmental Psychology” at Masters’ level, which I taught at Heidelberg University during the summer semester of 2022, and is replenished with experiences from a general course on “Science Communication” at Bachelor’s level taught during winter 2022/23. Experiences document that students are interested in communicating scientific findings, and eager to develop their skills for this important task. Course structure, experiences and outcomes are documented, and slides as well as science communication outputs are shared via an open science platform.
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References
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