Goals and design of public physics lectures: perspectives of high-school students, physics teachers and lecturers

Abstract

Many large scientific projects and scientific centres incorporate some kind of outreach programme. Almost all of these outreach programmes include public scientific lectures delivered by practising scientists. In this article, we examine such lectures from the perspectives of: (i) lecturers (7) who are practising scientists acknowledged to be good public lecturers and (ii) audiences composed of high-school students (169) and high-school physics teachers (80) who attended these lectures. We identify and discuss the main goals as expressed by the lecturers and the audiences, and the correspondence between these goals. We also discuss how the lecturers' goals impact on the design of their lectures and examine how the lecture affects audiences with different attitudes towards (and interests in) physics. Our findings suggest that the goals of the participating lecturers and the expectations of their audiences were highly congruent. Both believe that a good public scientific lecture must successfully communicate state-of-the-art scientific knowledge to the public, while inspiring interest in and appreciation of science. Our findings also suggest that exemplary public scientific lectures incorporate content, structure and explanatory means that explicitly adhere to the lecturers' goals. We identify and list several design principles.

Utilizing public scientific web lectures to teach contemporary physics at the high school level: A case study of learning

“…Two exemplary public physics web lectures were used: one in the domain of astrophysics and one in the domain of quantum mechanics (QM). An analysis of these lectures appears elsewhere and shows that they shared the same explanatory framework [4,7]. C. Activities accompanying the Lectures 1.…”

“…Many of these lectures are available on the web [1,2]. Although the impact of public scientific lectures on their attendees' perceptions, ideas, and opinions about scientific issues has been studied [3,4], as far as we know, no study has examined the learning of the content presented in these lectures. Extending previous studies [4][5][6][7] we thus explore ways to utilize these lectures to introduce contemporary physics at the high school level and study the learning that take place in this context.…”

An Instrument for Assessing Scientists’ Written Skills in Public Communication of Science

“…Reviewing the literature, we developed a framework of learning goals for public communication of science (Table 1), with particular attention to goals for written communication (which we believed would be most amenable to systematic assessment). This framework builds on work that looks at different contexts and types of public communication (Miller, Fahy, & The ESConet Team, 2009), on theoretically informed analyses of pedagogical presentations by scientists and science students (Kapon, Ganiel, & Eylon, 2009, 2010; Sevian & Gonsalves, 2008), and on our own reading from a wide range of practical advice books for scientists (e.g., Baron, 2010; Christensen, 2007; Cribb & Hartomo, 2002; Dean, 2009; Hayes & Grossman, 2006; Meredith, 2010).…”

“…The pedagogical literature looks at issues such as the presentation techniques of leading physicists who are also highly successful popular physics public lecturers (Kapon et al, 2009, 2010) and the practices used by science graduate students to explain their research to nonscientists (Sevian & Gonsalves, 2008). We found the following clusters of goals identified by Kapon et al (2009, 2010) to be especially useful:…”

“… Sources: Hayes and Grossman (2006), Dean (2009), Cribb and Hartomo (2002), Christensen (2007), Meredith (2010), Baron (2010), Kapon, Ganiel, and Eylon (2009, 2010). …”