Scientific Memes: Using the Language of Social Media to Improve Scientific Literacy and Communication in Lifespan Development

Abstract

Social media is riddled with memes (i.e., captioned images intended to convey cultural ideas or beliefs) that often promote maladaptive and unsupported beliefs about human development and parenting. This paper presents a scientific writing assignment designed to help spread accurate information on human development beyond the classroom through creation and sharing of original material on social media. Students were tasked with identifying applicable themes of the course, transforming these themes into scientific memes with supporting research articles, posting these materials to social media, and reflecting on their experiences. This assignment helps students develop critical thinking and scientific literacy, as well as their ability to apply course concepts to everyday life and share those applications with others. Student outcomes from several sections of Lifespan Development—those with the scientific meme assignment versus those with a traditional writing assignment—were analyzed for differences in quantitative measures of student success (i.e., grades). Students’ written reflections were also assessed for common themes. Findings suggest advantages of social media assignments with regard to students’ sense of purpose, experience with scholarly discourse, and student growth, and may inspire creation of additional innovative assignments that promote student learning and application.

Are Scientific Memes Motivating and Does Public Sharing Affect Motivation?

“…Based on the expectancy-value-cost framework of motivation, it can be deduced that student motivation for this renewable assignment was relatively high. This is consistent with findings on scientific memes in which students reported a greater sense of purpose when creating memes than when writing summaries on research topics (Riser et al, 2020).…”

“…The Scientific Meme Project served as the renewable assignment for the study and was a required assignment in five different courses taught by the authors of this study (see Riser et al, 2020, for a similar assignment). Students were randomly assigned through the institution's learning management system (Blackboard) to two different sets of instructions: One (closed, control) in which students only shared their project with the course, and a second (open, treatment) in which students were informed their instructor would share the memes on their public Twitter accounts (students only saw the instructions for their assigned condition).…”

“…Scientific memes are images or videos with minimal text to convey scientific findings or concepts (Riser et al, 2020). Memes, in general, are popular on social media and the internet in general; therefore, memes may be a means to engage students in psychology content as students are already familiar with the creative potential of memes for communication (Kath et al, 2022).…”

“…Memes, in general, are popular on social media and the internet in general; therefore, memes may be a means to engage students in psychology content as students are already familiar with the creative potential of memes for communication (Kath et al, 2022). Comparisons of scientific memes to traditional research writing assignments have indicated similar grades, but more completion of memes (Riser et al, 2020). The higher completion rate of memes over traditional writing assignments may indicate that memes are more motivating for students, thereby prompting this current study's inquiry into student motivation.…”

Knowledge Management in the Age of Unreliable Messages. Do University Students Trust Online Messages? (A Survey from the Middle East)

“…Rather than focusing on the audience of social media messages, some studies have directed their attention on the systems and methods that may help more accurate messages flow through digital information networks (see: Riser et al, 2020). Verification labs and verification experts that would monitor the popular online messages and conduct fact-checking for the public are among the foci of these studies (see: Kruger, 2017).…”