Developing Science Communication Capabilities: A Customisable, Interactive Tutorial Series for Creating and Presenting Engaging Science Communication

The ability to effectively communicate science is a key attribute for science graduates in universities around the world. Communicating science requires an understanding of both the scientific content to be presented and the key skills required to share this information effectively to an audience. These core capabilities for effective science communication, or threshold concepts, have been defined by extensive research. However, there is a distinct lack of guidance on how to teach students this core knowledge and skills. This Lesson details four interactive tutorials designed to teach science students how to summarise scientific research and present the concepts as an engaging science narrative. Throughout the tutorials, students are provided with a scientific manuscript and then shown how to summarise the key information. Students are then shown how to transform this summary into an engaging narrative that tells the story of the research that incorporates other work&nbsp;to contextualise the manuscript. Students are introduced to the idea of storyboarding and its usefulness in planning accurate and informative visual representations of scientific concepts. And finally, students are shown how to create engaging presentations and are given techniques for engaging delivery of the information and images. The tutorials detailed in this Lesson provide students with an opportunity to learn these skills and then practice the skill with structured worksheets that guide them through the example. <em>Primary Image:</em>&nbsp;The key steps for creating effective science communication. A visual flowchart that represents the four topics of the four tutorials detailed in this Lesson.