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    Communicating Science & Medical Science to the Public

    Introduction

    Temporary Page:

    Cancer News Articles May Contribute to Confusion About Cancer [Oct. 2010]

      "New research from North Carolina State University shows that most online news stories about cancer contain language that likely contributes to public uncertainty about the disease -- a significant finding, given that at least one-third of Americans seek health information online. "Previous studies show that more than 100 million Americans seek health information online, and that their findings affect their health decisions," says Dr. Kami Kosenko, an assistant professor of communication at NC State and co-author of a paper describing the study. "But, while people facing uncertainty about cancer issues are likely to seek out additional information, we've found that there are features of the information they're seeking that may actually exacerbate the uncertainty." "We found that nearly two-thirds of cancer news articles contain at least some uncertain terms -- words or phrases that reflect probability or ambiguity rather than certainty,"


  • Melissa McCartney, M. (2010) "Wikipedia Goes to Grad School." Science ["Editor's Choice"] 330:891 [DOI: 10.1126/science.330.6006.891-c]. "Very few graduate-level science curricula include training in communicating advanced concepts to a general audience. Moy et al. report a class project that addressed this by having chemistry students edit ..." Citation:

      Moy, C.L. et al. (2010) "Improving Science Education and Understanding through Editing Wikipedia." Journal of Chemical Education 87:1159-1162. [DOI: 10.1021/ed100367v] "This paper describes a graduate-level class project centered on editing chemistry-related entries in Wikipedia. This project enables students to work collaboratively, explore advanced concepts in chemistry, and learn how to communicate science to a diverse audience, including the general public. The format and structure of the project is outlined and assessment metrics are discussed. A panel survey of current students provided an evaluation of the effectiveness of this project in contributing to the learning objectives of the course. Last, a discussion of the challenges involved in implementing this project is provided."

      See also Wikipedia Goes to Grad School: "Very few graduate-level science curricula include training in communicating advanced concepts to a general audience. Moy et al. report a class project that addressed this by having chemistry students edit an entry in Wikipedia.org collaboratively. Students selected topics that were related to the course and were minimally covered on Wikipedia. Student entries contained references, an introduction aimed at the general public, and figures to enhance the explanation of the topic. Student feedback collected at the end of the project revealed increased knowledge of their topic. A specialist in writing and rhetoric concluded that the students’ entries were more engaging to general readers because of the attention to real-world applications and clear explanations of vocabulary. Course professors noted that students appeared to assess the material they added to the entry more critically than when they were simply studying for the class, which is consistent with the notion of students’ developing a higher level of explanatory knowledge when teaching the material is a goal."


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