Distilling your science – How to effectively communicate your science to non-scientists
As part of the training provided by my IRACDA fellowship, we have been taking a number of workshops to make us better teachers and professionals. So far, we’ve had workshops on how to write a teaching statement, course design and assessment, and even an improv workshop, but we just finished a fascinating discussion on how to effectively communicate our science from Elizabeth Bath in the Alan Alda Center for Communicating Education.
As researchers we do amazing things, and usually can effectively communicate to our peers using our precise language. However, many of us find it extremelly difficult in explaining our work to a lay audience. If your anything like me, you’ve been in the situation where a friend or family member asks about your work, and just failled to get your point across. Just this past weekend after I showed my grandmother around my lab, showing her my animals, microinjection station, and equipment, and talking a bit about my work. As she was leaving, she thought it was great that I was ‘poking all those frog eggs’.We scientists have an increasing need to be able to effectively communicate our science to non-experts. For instance, most grants now require some sort of statement understandable by a general lay audience about the broader impact of our work, such as the NIH Project Narrative, or a Broader Impact statement in an NSF proposal. These may seem trivial compared to the more detailed aspects of our aims and experimental overview, but probably just as important in the broader sense. In a federal grants, these statements are mandated by congress and used to help congress better understand what they are funding and why, and in this age of sequestration and other cuts to the NIH and NSF budgets, you don’t want your grant to draw the ire of some congressperson trying to cut ‘waste’. Fortunately, the public is still widely positive about science; a pew report in 2009 found that 84% of the public has a positive view of scientists. However, in many metrics we are slipping; with only 27% of 2009 respondents finding science/medicine/technology have been our nations greatest achievements, compared to 47% a decade before, and only 60% of the public sees governmental funding of public research as essential. Science
So how do we become better ambassadors of the amazing things that we do (and trust me, you are doing important work). Here are a few tips I learned from the course…
1) Start broadly. Try to think about what the greatest outcome from your research for the betterment of humanity. Although it may be years, or even decades away, could your work lead to better treatments of disease, such as cancer or neurlogical diseases? Or does it have an economic impact, e.g ecological focuses on species that are pollinators (e.g. bats or bees)? Before you begin to get into any of the specifics, make sure you’ve first explained the bigger picture impacts of your work.
2) Use simple language. We often need to be extremely precise language when we are communicating to our peers which will usually confuse non-specialists. However, it is not just jargon, but often we are using unneeded academic language. A good rule of thumb is conversationally, your audience best understands language used three grade levels below highest achieved grade. Not that you have to talk down to people, but try to avoid using too many multiple-syllabic terms. Furthermore, many of the terms we use have different meaning in our fields then outside of them; e.g. when you say the term model, people often think of glueing together a toy airplane instead of a representation of a phenomenon. Avoid terms like ‘basic’ research; people often misunderstand basic as ‘simple’, as if a step towards more advanced research. Instead, just say scientific research, or just research. One example we had in the course started with a students initial research statement in which they desrcibed their research broadly as studying the effect of Didymosphenia geminata effect on riverine ecosystems and public use. After several questions, the student was able to rephrase their work as studying how rock-snot, an invasive freshwater algae that can form large gross mats in rivers and lakes, is impacting both recreational use and native fish and wildlife.
3) Avoid nuance. We all have many elements of our work that have a greater degree of uncertainty, and as such we often try couch our statements when presenting our work to peers or in publications. However, to a lay audience such nuances can make our message confusing, and are usually unnecessary. When discussing your work in brief, be bold, state your broad impact and general overview of your work first using the best interpretation you can imagine. If you can’t get this point across, then how can you expect to communicate a more nuanced understanding. If your anything like me, it requires a certain amount of bravery to be so certain, but it will really aid in communicating your work.
4) Be interesting! The more you can get your audience interested in your work, the easier it will be to get your message across. In order to hook your audience, what about your work is surprising, exciting, difficult, or mysterious about your work? Does something about your work defy common logic? For instance, when i’m talking about my frog development, I usually mention that my species of frogs was once used as a pregnancy test, or that my frog has most of the same genes that we do. Furthermore, what is vivid or concrete about your work? Or does what you study have a memorable name (e.g. rock-snot, or lone star tick, or ‘lucy’)? And when you are trying to get a confusing concept across, try to think of examples, anlogies, comparisons, or use visual props. Also, do you have a personal connection to the work? Our campus and others have conducted controlled studies showing that when teachers share personal stories to connect to their students/audience, the students are both engage more and perform better in these classes. Try to share what made you interested in your research in the first place.
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