Meet the Scientist: The Value of Short Interactions Between Scientists and Students

Abstract

Students have been reported to have stereotypical views of scientists as middle-aged white men in lab coats. We argue that a way to provide students with a more realistic view of scientists and their work is to provide them with the opportunity to interact with scientists during short, discussion-based sessions. For that reason, 20 scientists from 8 professional areas were asked to share their experiences of becoming and being a scientist, in short sessions with groups of 7 -8 students. The student sample consisted of 223 students between 13 and 15 years. Student and scientist questionnaires were used before and after the sessions to assess students' views of scientists and their work, and scientists' experiences of interacting with students. The pre-session questionnaires revealed that students considered scientists as 'boring' and 'nerdy' whereas after the sessions students focused extensively on how 'normal' the scientists appeared to be. The faceto-face interactions with scientists allowed students to view scientists as approachable and normal people, and to begin to understand the range of scientific areas and careers that exist. Scientists viewed the scientist-student interactions as a vehicle for science communication. Implications discussed include the need for future training courses to focus on developing science communicators' questioning and interaction skills for effective interactions with students.

Do outreach activities in secondary STEM education motivate students and improve their attitudes towards STEM?

“…The teacher then serves as a role model (Sjaastad, 2012): the relatedness need will then be fulfilled. As in outreach students get the opportunity to have short interactions with STEM-professionals by asking questions, the students will be able to establish links between themselves and professionals and narrow the gap between perceived and actual images of these professionals (Woods-Townsend et al, 2016). The extent to which the STEM-professionals or teachers support the students and the supportive interrelationships between students will sustain relatedness.…”

Does the messenger matter? Studying the impacts of scientists and engineers interacting with public audiences at science festival events

“…Perceptions of scientists, in general, can also be influenced by personal interactions. Although public audiences generally hold traditional, outdated, and inaccurate ideas about what scientists and scientific activities look like, [Woods-Townsend et al, 2016;Christidou, 2010], after personal interactions with scientists, children and adults' depictions of them are more accurate [Woods-Townsend et al, 2016].…”

A collaborative approach to schools engagement training for university staff

“…SUPI was the Building School-University Partnerships Guide Book (Wager, 2016), a now internationally recognized (see, for example, Posner et al, 2016) resource for school-university partnership working. The Guide Book material leant itself well to a practical training session, and a suitable gap in our researcher development programme was identified: the number of UoS staff delivering material for schools was vast, often with little quality control and based on peer learning, and only one schools-specific training session was then available, the introductory Meet the Scientist training from LifeLab (Woods-Townsend et al, 2016).…”