Communicating to succeed: enhancing Bioscience students’ skills through science communication

A flexible, adaptable 3-week summer project focusing on science communication can enhance bioscience students’ academic and professional skill gains, placement attainment rates, confidence, as well as provide a transnational educational opportunity.

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Our challenge

Amongst our Biomedical and Biomolecular Sciences degree programmes, approximately 10% of students secure placement year positions between lRQF level 5 and 6, but these roles are highly competitive and require students to have a broad range of relevant experiences to draw upon during the application process. Such experiences were greatly limited during the COVID-19 pandemic, so recognising this prompted us to devise an innovative way we could provide an in-house opportunity for students to broaden their CV outside of the normal curriculum and still be able to secure competitive placement year positions during stage 2 – as, despite the pandemic, life science companies were still recruiting students for their placement programmes. The target audience were our first year Biomedical and Biomolecular Sciences students, including those from NUMed.

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Our solution (approach)

We developed a 3-week summer project, termed the SciComm Summer Project, centred around the ubiquitous skill of science communication. To provide equal opportunity for all students, the project was delivered exclusively online (via Zoom and Teams) during the summer using a mix of synchronous and asynchronous teaching practices. All sessions were recorded and directly available to participants to support participation of those undertaking part-time work, internships, with caring responsibilities or otherwise unable to attend (e.g. due to time zone differences).

Students ‘applied’ to the project at the end of stage 1 by submitting their CV and brief statement of interest, to mimic the placement application process. Students were then split into small groups (maximum 6 participants) with each group assigned a recent scientific paper involving Newcastle University researchers, chosen from a selection of bioscience papers featured by the university’s Press Office. Over the 3-week project period, participants were trained in and completed three assessments comprising an individual literature review pitched at a typical academic audience, an individual oral presentation pitched at GCSE-age (15–16 years’ old) students, and a group poster presentation in a conference-style virtual poster session pitched at undergraduate student peers. Skills support sessions including literature review writing, presentation skills and group work, as well as supplementary sessions including engagement with research, CV/LinkedIn profile development, were delivered by academic staff and other ‘external’ contributors from across the University, including from the University’s Careers Service, Engagement and Outreach, Academic Skills and Enterprise teams. Past/present placement student talks were also included to provide peer insight and sharing of personal experiences.

The BMS SciComm Summer Project Open Badge

To evaluate the impact of the project, we asked students to complete pre- and post-project surveys via SurveyMonkey to investigate their academic and graduate framework skill development, as well as the project in general. Survey questions were aligned to the university’s Graduate Framework.

The project started in 2021 with a focus on filling an experience gap for placement year attainment, then evolved and was successfully repeated over subsequent years to positively impact students’ professional and academic skills.

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The impact (results)

To date, 89 students have completed the project over the past 4 years (72F, 17M of which 55 were Home UK, 26 International and 8 NUMed students). Students applying to the project primarily wanted to develop their core academic skills (including academic writing, communication and research skills), but were also interested in enhancing their confidence, teamwork and collaboration skills, amongst others.

Post-project, students reported a statistically significant increase in 16 out of 18 skills, with curiosity and problem-solving also increasing slightly. A longitudinal survey of students that subsequently went on to secure placement year positions revealed that a higher percentage were successful in securing placements (72% of project participants, vs approximately 10% of the normal cohort) and these students reported the project was beneficial in their placement applications and interviews, using experiences from the project as evidence in competency-style interview questions.

Overall students reported they enjoyed the project (99% positive) and that it enhanced their employability (99% positive). A selection of student highlights from the project were:

“Meeting people from my course and developing my communication and academic writing skills. I also now know how to use MS Teams correctly!”

“Independently working and being proactive whilst also gaining teamwork experience and communication practice.”

“Meeting new people on the course and getting to know the lecturers”

“It opens my mind to the opportunities that are out there.”

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Lessons learned

One of the biggest challenges was the time involved in setting up and delivering the project. At first, the academic team took on a lot of the project delivery but this fell shortly after the university’s exam board period, just before the August resit period, and the week after the School’s PARTNERS programme – so was an additional workload burden in what otherwise would have been a bit of academic “downtime”. However, this was alleviated over the years as the team became more experienced with running the project, and as we began to onboard staff from other teams across the university to deliver some of the content – this balance of delivery appeared to be appreciated by the student participants, with 13/32 respondents in the post-project survey indicating their favourite session was one delivered by an ‘external’ contributor and others remarking on the benefits of getting to know the academic team on a closer level, which is not normally possible during term-time due to time constraints and the cohort size.

Also linked to the time burden of administering the project was the marking load. With three assessments across a three-week period, marking turnaround time was tight. To alleviate this, the project team implemented a simplified approach to providing feedback which was, for each assessment, to provide ‘3 good things’ and ‘3 things to improve’. Keeping feedback restricted to this approach and only providing an overall pass/fail for the project simplified the feedback and marking process and aligned with an existing School strategy to provide a consistent approach to feedback across assessments. No free text comments from the post-project survey indicated dissatisfaction with the approach to feedback – in fact, the majority were positive including one comment that the overall highlight was “being able to write a literature review with no grade attached and get feedback” and one that “the feedback was very useful”.

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Tips for colleagues

Follow the 5 Ps (proper planning prevents poor performance)! Most of the project administration can be set up and organised in advance, and doing so helps to relieve the time burden during the project period, and then only minor tweaks are needed each year in response to student or staff feedback.

Onboarding contributors beyond academic staff is also a huge help – we are grateful to colleagues from the Academic Skills team, Engagement and Outreach team, Press Office and Careers Service for assisting with delivery and bring their expertise to the project.

There is always new and exciting research being highlighted on the University’s Press Office website – browsing for inspiration helps to keep the content of the project fresh each year, too. Marking identical literature reviews and presentations year after year otherwise gets tiring!

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Skills and attributes

Students were able to develop the following attributes:

• Reflective and self-aware
• Self-management
• Self-directed learning
• Flexibility and resilience
• Critical thinking
• Problem solving
• Creative thinking
• Digital skills
• Communication
• Collaboration

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Education for Life Strategy

This case study reflects the following aims of the Education for Life strategy: (remove irrelevant)

• Equity: To provide a core, universal offer for all students, including tailored provision where needed, to ensure equity of access, experience and in outcomes for all, regardless of background, identity, nationality, location or mode of study.
• Encounters with the Leading Edge: To put at the heart of our curriculum and learning experiences, encounters with our world leading research and the leading edge of industry and practice.
• Fit for the future: To ensure our students are fit for their future, our teaching is fit for the future of our offer, and our colleagues are fit for the future of HE

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Further resources

• Read our full paper on the project
• Explore the accompanying toolkit

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