Engaging Science: Transforming Graduate Education through Public Engagement with Science

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Improved public engagement with science is needed to promote scientific literacy and support science-informed policies and practices to address society's critical issues. Further, scientists are increasingly called upon to engage in public outreach about their research. Many people with graduate degrees in science are employed in roles involving public outreach. For these reasons, education on conducting public engagement with science should be meaningfully integrated into STEM graduate education. This NSF Innovations in Graduate Education (IGE) award to the University of Cincinnati will investigate the value of systematic instruction in public engagement with science for meaningful public engagement, interdisciplinary collaboration, and diversity and inclusion in STEM. The researchers will develop a 3-part educational sequence called the "Engaging Science" curriculum. The curriculum is innovative in its use of interdisciplinary collaboration, community partnership, and perspectives from the philosophy of science to provide graduate students with the background and skills needed to lead effective public engagement with science. This research project will rigorously examine the transformative impact of public engagement with science instruction, with the potential to advance the public reach of STEM disciplines and diversity and inclusion in STEM disciplines. The project will run three annual cycles of the Engaging Science curriculum with thirty graduate students in each cycle. The three part curriculum begins with an intensive workshop providing hands-on experience in a museum setting. A semester-long course then follows which culminates in outreach projects conducted by multidisciplinary teams. Third, and finally an internship with a community partner organization leads to an individual outreach project. A mixed-methods convergent parallel research design will be used to combine surveys, interviews, focus groups, and archival data. The study will examine the curriculum's potential to equip graduate students to engage public audiences more meaningfully. The research plan combines quantitative and qualitative methods to examine the unique and additive impact of each level of training on short- and long-term outcomes. This approach will facilitate the adaptation of the curriculum for implementation in diverse contexts.The Innovations in Graduate Education (IGE) program is focused on research in graduate education. The goals of IGE are to pilot, test and validate innovative approaches to graduate education and to generate the knowledge required to move these approaches into the broader community.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.