Following Research!America’s civic science programs.

“I initially proposed a workshop, but what became really apparent is, one, a one-hour workshop is not long enough to talk about evaluation. And two, it’s really hard to return back to a recording of a workshop, or to look at your notes and figure out what to do. I was trying to think of something more sustainable, something that people could use in the planning phase, and so that’s where the workbook came from.”

“We’re contacting all the local universities in our area—UNC, Duke, NC State, Wake Forest. We are having about 30 labs come in, and we’re going to walk them through how to create a beer label. Those beer labels, we hope, will be released by the brewery. It’s going to be a huge endeavor, but that is our goal.”

“Every year we host a Brain Awareness Open House, which is a big reverse science fair where University of Washington and other Seattle neuroscientists can set up booths to show local high schoolers what research is happening in their own backyards. We host this event so that students can learn how their brain impacts their daily lives, meet their friendly neighborhood neuroscientists, and feel empowered to pursue—or at least be curious about—neuroscience themselves.”

“Based on pre- and post-event surveys, we learned that more students were interested in and felt capable of being a neuroscientist than they did before the event. More students said that they wanted to pursue their own research projects after seeing the demonstrations. We also found that trainee volunteers felt more confident in communicating their science effectively and enthusiastically to a broader audience.”

“For the workshop itself, I have an evaluation that I created. A lot of it is around having people think differently about what a debriefing can do, and especially think about their goals and objectives and the content of what they’re communicating. I had questions about: before the workshop, how much did you think about this, and after the workshop, how much did you think about this?”

“I think evaluation is important, because I do think you need data to show that this is working. From the public, we want to ask: did you get a lot out of it? Would you come back? I would love to go to my department and be like, ‘Hey, this is data to suggest that this is working. We need to do this. We need to invest in this.’”

“As a scientist, we form hypotheses, design experiments, and interpret the results, but we are also in charge of sharing all the things that we find. When I think about a scientist, public engagement is just part of being a scientist, and I truly, firmly believe that. It’s not just designing my experiments; it’s how can I get this out to my community? How can I get it to the public in more than just scientific journals?”

“All parts of our research are communicating things to our participants, whether we’re aware of it or not. Participants are making inferences about science, about the scientists, about their beliefs and what they care about, and their relationship to participants. You kind of can’t opt out of the communication as a researcher. Your study is going to be communicating things, but what you can do is be more intentional about what it’s communicating.”

“There’s been a big push to think about culturally responsive evaluation. Is this program having different impacts on different groups of people? How do identities play into that? What voices are being heard in that data? Are we talking to everyone that is going to be impacted by this program, or are we only hearing a couple of voices?”

“I’m ready to give some guidance, and then it’s like, well, I don’t actually have an empirical basis for a lot of this guidance. A lot of what I’m learning is that there need to be more studies. We need to do good evaluation and impact assessment on debriefings just like we would for a wholesale public engagement or science communication project.”

“The biggest barrier has been people saying that it shouldn’t matter as much as the other things—that it didn’t matter as much as the science. To me, it goes hand in hand. I think the barrier is that, as a scientific enterprise, there is no commitment to civic engagement right now.”

“Right now, the workbook focuses on more traditional data collection methods—interviews, surveys, and observations. The workbook would maybe be less helpful for people who do media, so maybe they have a website or they’re trying to evaluate a podcast. I think that I haven’t quite ventured into that space yet.”