Teaching Future Scientists to Talk
Much has been written about the need for scientists to speak more plainly and compellingly about their research. Yet complaints about their poor communication skills continue unabated in the popular and academic press and in agencies that finance their work.
But perhaps it’s too late to work on those communication skills once scientists are already established. That’s why we have devised a program, with support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, that seeks to build and maintain those skills early—in undergraduates who are exploring research careers by working in life-science laboratories.
Our program is a collaboration between life scientists at the University of Missouri at Columbia and faculty members in the School of Journalism. We pay students to work in research laboratories and develop independent research projects, and, at the same time, we train them in journalistic and communication techniques. Participating students produce blogs, news articles, videos, and other science-news reports using our media lab and the SciXchange Web portal. They meet weekly or biweekly with members of the journalism school for mentoring and to discuss the relationship between research and the public’s perception of it.
Our goal is to produce a generation of researchers who appreciate the need for public communication and are prepared to do it well.
Cross-training young scientists is a fine idea, but it requires bridging a cultural gap between scientists and communicators, whether the latter are journalists, public-relations officers, or others seeking to get science’s messages across to the public.
We knew that many scientists, especially those in mid-to-late career, fail to see the value of bridging that gap and may even be hostile to the idea. For their part, journalists and communicators often feel inadequate when trying to translate science. We have been shocked by the size of that cultural gap during the first two years of our project.
Early on, we were amazed to find that the student researchers selected for our program did not understand what it meant to learn to communicate broadly—even though they had been fully informed of the program’s goals when they joined it. As we got to know our talented participants better, the reason for their confusion became clear: They had already been in research labs too long.
Undergraduates are thrilled to be accepted into the “secret society” of science, where they learn a new language that only they and their research colleagues understand. They are motivated to cement their place in that new community by quickly adopting the lingo.
The speed of that transition came as a shock. Our first cohort of students had been working in labs for about a year, on average, when we began working with them on their communication skills. Already, however, they had difficulty in describing their work to someone outside of their field of study. They were unaware of how the news media were reporting on science, even when the news involved research from their own fields and sometimes from their own labs.