The Society of Environmental Journalists is pleased to announce the Outstanding Student Reporting winners of the 2023 SEJ Awards for Reporting on the Environment. Read the stories and hear from one of the first-place winners.
Scientists Need to Become Better Communicators, But It’s Hard to Measure Whether Training Works
Organizations that train scientists have to do more than just ask participants in a class whether they learned anything
The COVID-19 pandemic has underscored the need for scientists to excel at public communication. (Photo by Anna Moneymaker-Pool/Getty Images) Copy Link
Science is essential to solving many of society’s biggest problems, but it doesn’t always find a receptive audience. Today, when curbing COVID-19 requires hundreds of millions of Americans to get vaccinated, it’s more urgent than ever for scientists to be able to communicate effectively with the public.
September 25, 2020Science is essential to solving many of society’s biggest problems, but it doesn’t always find a receptive audience. Today, when curbing Covid-19 requires hundreds of millions of Americans to get vaccinated, it’s more urgent than ever for scientists to be able to communicate effectively with the public.
The challenge was clear long before the pandemic. Scientists began to realize they needed to do better at explaining their findings in the 1990s, after fossil fuel corporations and conservative politicians rejected evidence that the globe was warming at an alarming rate. In response, a range of programs sprang up that were designed to teach everyone, from veteran scientists to young graduate students, how to better communicate their often arcane and confusing research.