ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Educ.
Sec. STEM Education
Volume 10 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/feduc.2025.1558203
How to Talk About Science in Ways that are Comprehensible and Interesting? Evaluation of an Evidence-based Science Communication Training Program for Graduate Students
Provisionally accepted
- Technical University of Braunschweig, Braunschweig, Germany
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In order to graduate, students in higher education need to acquire a diverse set of competencies. Addressing complex socio-scientific issues, working in interdisciplinary teams, and mastering communicative competencies and skills are aims within students' professional education. However, training in science communication usually is not embedded in formal education programs and existing training programs are often insufficiently or not at all evaluated. The aim of the present study is to provide an example on how to comprehensively evaluate training programs targeting practical skills by evaluating the effectiveness of an evidence-based science communication training program. We implemented a pre-post summative evaluation design and tested whether attitudes, selfefficacy beliefs, knowledge and actual science communication performance increased due to the intervention and the sample consisted of 44 master's students from different disciplinary backgrounds. The participants were highly satisfied with the training and their self-efficacy beliefs, their self-rated abilities, their knowledge, and their favorable attitudes regarding strategies to enhance involvement increased while attitudes regarding comprehensibility-related strategies remained on an already high level. Strategy use in communication performance was measured by analyzing transcribed recordings of short video presentations. While comprehensibility-strategies remained on a high level, involvement-strategy use increased. In conclusion, we provided evidence for the effectiveness of our training program on most outcome variables as well as high satisfaction. Furthermore, we suggest an operationalization of basic science communication competencies and discuss challenges regarding the behavioral assessment of actual science communication performance as well as the limitation of not having had a control group.
Keywords: Communication Skills, Evaluation, higher education, Science Communication, training program
Received: 26 Feb 2025; Accepted: 10 Jun 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Fick, Hendriks and Thies. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Julian Fick, Technical University of Braunschweig, Braunschweig, Germany
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