STEM education requires STEM communication lessons

STEM instruction is incomplete without the ability to communicate discoveries to students.

This is the first of a two-part series.

The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics projects that employment in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) occupations is expected to grow by 8.8% from 2018 to 2028, compared to just 5.2% in non-STEM occupations. will remain at an increase. This increase indicates the growing demand for he STEM professionals in the job market. Schools have recognized this trend and are offering STEM and STEAM (STEM + Arts) courses to provide students with the skills needed for an evolving workforce.

We want this generation of students to make valuable STEM discoveries in the future. But if students don't learn how to communicate their discoveries, those discoveries won't benefit themselves or society. This is not easy.

The information deficit model of communication, in which simply providing more information leads to understanding, has long been proven wrong. Think about climate change. Scientists' communication of global warming research results has been considered one of the greatest science communication failures in history. This is because emphasizing catastrophes is very difficult for people to bear (Stoknes, 2015). Presenting harsh statistics and projections will disengage your audience from the problem, and apathy will negatively impact behavior change. On the contrary, providing people with positive images of a greener future, engaging and meaningful stories, and fun ways to reduce their carbon footprint will encourage people to conserve resources and be a key aspect of climate change. (Brunhuber, 2016). For example, John Christensen revised an environmental report that 50 University of California (UC) scientists shared with the United Nations (UN) to provide practical ways students and staff can contribute, including fun incentives to conserve water. We have made it possible to provide. The resulting report was solution-oriented, easy to understand, and successfully changed behavior across UC's 10 campuses (Brunhuber, 2016).

Similarly, it helps to prepare people before delivering a controversial message. For example, research from Yale University shows that stimulating scientific curiosity in audiences is a very powerful approach to increasing acceptance of climate research findings, and that it can influence people's political leanings toward such findings. demonstrated that it can even be overcome (Kahan, Landrum, Carpenter, Helft, & Jamieson, 2017).

To know how best to communicate STEM discoveries to others, we need to understand the facts, reasons, or reasons why people resist action. This may involve confronting deep-seated biases, or it may involve addressing the innate mental mechanisms within everyone. The latter includes behavioral economics, cognitive dissonance, motivated reasoning, and more. For example, people often deny scientific evidence of climate change due to identity, confirmation bias, apathy, or other issues. Knowing that resource use and pollution emissions are at unsustainable levels, many audiences will argue that markets and technology will solve resource limitations, or that they will need additional research before accepting that there is a problem. They will simply deny that there is a problem, demanding results or otherwise. by physically moving the problem to another local location (Meadows, Randers, & Meadows, 2005). Resistance to this fact prevents audiences from progressing beyond the early stages of behavioral change models, such as the pre-reflective stage of the Transtheoretical Model (TTM). Fortunately, teachers can understand this resistance and teach students to counter it by incorporating her STEM communication lessons into her STEM (and other existing) curricula.

Part II will be posted soon for you to read more.

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