New publication in Irish Educational Studies!

We have a new publication! Practice makes progress: an evaluation of an online scientist-student chat activity in improving scientists’ perceived communication skills. Our most recent publication, authored by Sarah Carroll (CE national coordinator) and Muriel Grenon (CE director), features in the special edition of Irish Educational Studies: COVID-19 and Education: Positioning the pandemic; facing the future.

A study on “I’m a Cell EXPLORERS Scientist Online Chat”

This article describes the evaluation of the I’m a Cell EXPLORERS Scientist Online Chat (ICESOC) activity, delivered by the Cell EXPLORERS team last year during October – November. The activity was a collaboration with outreach programme and competition I’m a Scientist (www.imascientist.ie). Specifically, the article presents several key findings relating to the impact of participation in the ICESOC activity on our Cell EXPLORERS volunteers’ perceived science communication skills.

The ICESOC activity comprises a 35-minute online chat between Cell EXPLORERS scientists and young people (primary and secondary students aged 10-16 years old), facilitated on the Cell EXPLORERS zone on the I’m a Scientist website (www.imascientist.cellexplorers.com). During this online text-based chat, students could ask the Cell EXPLORERS scientists different aspects about science and scientists. During the ICESOC project, our Cell EXPLORERS volunteers participated in 10 sessions with pupils from primary and secondary schools around Ireland.

Main findings in the article

We explored how participating in these online chats affects our volunteers’ perceived science communication skills. We found that:

• The online training modules that we had developed to train our volunteers in this activity were clear and informative

• Children engaged well, but scientists struggled with the amount of questions

• Scientists reported perceived improvements to science communication skills – especially is using clear and simple language to convey their responses!

Read the article to find out more!

Read the article to find out more! It is OpenAccess – so free for everyone to read! You can also find it down below.

You can access supplementary material below- it contains figures that we wanted to share with readers, but we had to omit from the main article because of space constraints.

The article:

Practice makes progress: an evaluation of an online scientist-student chat activity in improving scientists’ perceived communication skills

Carroll & Grenon IES (2021) Practice mak

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Download • 1.25MB

Also available at: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/03323315.2021.1915840

Supplementary material:

Carroll & Grenon (2021) Supplementary Fi

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Download • 907KB

Let us know what you think! We would love to hear your thoughts on this article! You can tweet about it and tag us using @cellexplorers. You can also email us at cellexplorers@nuigalway.ie.