Mayfield Teresa J, Olimpo Jeffrey T, Floyd Kevin W, Greenbaum Eli
Biodiversity Collections, The University of Texas at El Paso, El Paso, TX 79968.
Department of Biological Sciences, The University of Texas at El Paso, El Paso, TX 79968.
J Microbiol Biol Educ. 2018 Mar 30;19(1). doi: 10.1128/jmbe.v19i1.1442. eCollection 2018.
Scientists are increasingly called upon to communicate with the public, yet most never receive formal training in this area. Public understanding is particularly critical to maintaining support for undervalued resources such as biological collections, research data repositories, and expensive equipment. We describe activities carried out in an inquiry-driven organismal biology laboratory course designed to engage a diverse student body using biological collections. The goals of this cooperative learning experience were to increase students' ability to locate and comprehend primary research articles, and to communicate the importance of an undervalued scientific resource to nonscientists. Our results indicate that collaboratively created, research-focused informational posters are an effective tool for achieving these goals and may be applied in other disciplines or classroom settings.
科学家们越来越多地被要求与公众进行交流，然而大多数人从未接受过这方面的正规培训。公众的理解对于维持对诸如生物标本馆、研究数据存储库和昂贵设备等被低估资源的支持尤为关键。我们描述了在一门以探究为导向的生物有机体生物学实验室课程中开展的活动，该课程旨在利用生物标本馆吸引多样化的学生群体。这种合作学习体验的目标是提高学生查找和理解原始研究文章的能力，并向非科学家传达一种被低估的科学资源的重要性。我们的结果表明，通过合作创建的、以研究为重点的信息海报是实现这些目标的有效工具，并且可能适用于其他学科或课堂环境。
