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  • Sep 29, 2015 Letter

    A response to “Highlighting the value of impact evaluation: enhancing informal science learning and public engagement theory and practice”

    by Heather King , Kate Steiner

    Whilst welcoming Jensen’s response to our original paper, we suggest that our main argument may have been missed. We agree that there are many methods for conducting impact assessments in informal settings. However, the capacity to use such tools is beyond the scope of many practitioners with limited budgets, time, and appropriate expertise to interpret findings.
    More particularly, we reiterate the importance of challenging the prevailing policy discourse in which longitudinal impact studies are regarded as the ‘gold standard’, and instead call for a new discourse that acknowledges what is feasible and useful in informal sector evaluation practice.

    Volume 14Issue 032015

  • Sep 29, 2015 Commentary

    Moving beyond the seductive siren of reach: planning for the social and economic impacts emerging from school-university engagement with research

    by Richard Holliman orcid logo , Gareth Davies

    In the past 25 years school-university partnerships have undergone a transition from ad hoc to strategic partnerships. Over the previous two-and-a-half-years we have worked in partnership with teachers and pupils from the Denbigh Teaching School Alliance in Milton Keynes, UK.
    Our aims have been to encourage the Open University and local schools in Milton Keynes to value, recognise and support school-university engagement with research, and to create a culture of reflective practice.
    Through our work we have noted a lack of suitable planning tools that work for researchers, teachers and pupils. Here we propose a flexible and adaptable metric to support stakeholders as they plan for, enact and evaluate direct and meaningful engagement between researchers, teachers and pupils. The objective of the metric is to make transparent the level of activity required of the stakeholders involved — teachers, pupils and researchers — whilst also providing a measure for institutions and funders to assess the relative depth of engagement; in effect, to move beyond the seductive siren of reach.

    Volume 14Issue 032015

  • Sep 29, 2015 Essay

    Highlighting the value of impact evaluation: enhancing informal science learning and public engagement theory and practice

    by Eric A. Jensen

    King et al. [2015] argue that ‘emphasis on impact is obfuscating the valuable role of evaluation’ in informal science learning and public engagement (p. 1). The article touches on a number of important issues pertaining to the role of evaluation, informal learning, science communication and public engagement practice. In this critical response essay, I highlight the article’s tendency to construct a straw man version of ‘impact evaluation’ that is impossible to achieve, while exaggerating the value of simple forms of feedback-based evaluation exemplified in the article. I also identify a problematic tendency, evident in the article, to view the role of ‘impact evaluation’ in advocacy terms rather than as a means of improving practice. I go through the evaluation example presented in the article to highlight alternative, impact-oriented evaluation strategies, which would have addressed the targeted outcomes more appropriately than the methods used by King et al. [2015]. I conclude that impact evaluation can be much more widely deployed to deliver essential practical insights for informal learning and public engagement practitioners.

    Volume 14Issue 032015

  • Sep 29, 2015 Editorial

    A question of (audience) reach

    by Emma Weitkamp

    Taking the International Science in Popular Culture conference as a starting point, this editorial considers audiences for cultural products, considering the size of audiences (from blockbuster films, to intimate science slams), their pre-existing (or lack of pre-existing) interest in the subject and what this might offer the field of science communication.

    Volume 14Issue 032015

  • Aug 25, 2015 Essay

    What is the “science of science communication”?

    by Dan Kahan

    This essay seeks to explain what the “science of science communication” is by doing it. Surveying studies of cultural cognition and related dynamics, it demonstrates how the form of disciplined observation, measurement, and inference distinctive of scientific inquiry can be used to test rival hypotheses on the nature of persistent public conflict over societal risks; indeed, it argues that satisfactory insight into this phenomenon can be achieved only by these means, as opposed to the ad hoc story-telling dominant in popular and even some forms of scholarly discourse. Synthesizing the evidence, the essay proposes that conflict over what is known by science arises from the very conditions of individual freedom and cultural pluralism that make liberal democratic societies distinctively congenial to science. This tension, however, is not an “inherent contradiction”; it is a problem to be solved — by the science of science communication understood as a “new political science” for perfecting enlightened self-government.

    Volume 14Issue 032015

  • Aug 19, 2015 Essay

    How to do mass media publicity for a neglected disease. Lessons from Tsetse and Trypanosomiasis in Kenya

    by Pamela Olet , Joseph Othieno

    The prioritization of neglected diseases in the policy making framework requires heightened advocacy [WHO, 2006]. Mass media positive publicity is among approaches that can be used to achieve this. This paper discusses practical use of mass media to do publicity and advocacy for a neglected disease and its vector. It uniquely presents online links to the analyzed newspaper and television news and opinion articles on tsetse and Trypanosomiasis. The paper shares entry points into mass media advocacy from a lessons learned perspective and notes the importance of understanding how the mass media works in order to achieve advocacy of neglected diseases using sleeping sickness as a case study. 

    Volume 14Issue 032015

  • Jul 24, 2015 Essay

    “Queue up, you stupid!”: communicating about technology problems. An exploratory study of warning messages posted on machines in public places

    by Beatrice Arbulla , Massimiano Bucchi

    Communication about technology has long been neglected within the field of science and technology communication. This visual exploratory study focuses on how users can communicate with and about technology in public places through warning signs posted on technological devices.
    Three broad categories of messages have been identified: bad design, malfunctioning and disciplining users. By analyzing examples within each category, we suggest that studying these communicative situations can be a key to understanding how users are engaged in continuous, elaborate and sometimes even conflicting framing of technological devices (e.g. with regard to their purpose, appropriate uses, shifting boundaries between functioning/malfunctioning); how such framing, in turn, can be used to readjust/realign social behavior and organizational routines.

    Volume 14Issue 032015

  • Jun 11, 2015 Commentary

    From activism to science and from science to activism in environmental-health justice conflicts

    by Marta Conde

    Knowledge is not static or unique. It can be exchanged between activists, academia and policy circles: from science to activism and from activism to science. Existing scientific knowledge is being used by activists to expose wrongdoings or improve practices and knowledge in environmental and health conflicts. Activists can either adopt scientific knowledge and data in their own argumentations or produce new scientific knowledge either by becoming scientists themselves or in co-operation with experts. Local and scientific knowledge is being combined to challenge government policies and the knowledge produced by corporate actors. Also explored is the figure of the expert-activist; with scientists becoming activists and vice versa, the boundaries between activists and scientists are increasingly blurry.

    Volume 14Issue 022015

Total: 1480 records