Faculty/Graduate Student Collaborative Workshop at the DMC Workshop Theme: Ocean-Climate Connections

Held at the Darling Marine Center in Walpole, ME Friday, January 29, 2010 and Monday through Tuesday, February 1-2, 2010

In addition to receiving feedback from their peers on their presentations, the graduate participants in the workshop had a chance to test their presentations on a third-party audience. A group of high school students from Waterville Senior High School watched all five presentations from the graduate student groups, and rated them on the same criteria that they rated the faculty on when giving their presentations. The results are shown below.

Participants were asked to rate each presentation according to four criteria:

• The Big Picture -- how well was the scientist's specific research question expanded to address broader issues and concerns and how clearly was that stated?
• Jargon -- how well did the scientists tailor their language to be accessible to a general audience or explain any jargon used?
• Concept map -- how well did the map itself organize the information being presented and help the audience understand important ideas?
• Take home message -- how memorable was the overall message of the presentation?

Blue represents the feedback given for all the groups by the high school audience, yellow represents the opinions of their teachers on the same presentations.

The comments from the high school audience gave the graduate students a direct understanding of this new audience's needs. Comments included suggestions to either tone down or increase the amount of scientific vocabulary (depending on the group), to re-state and remember to mention a take-home message, to specific suggestions on how to make the content more relevant to them. At the end of the workshop, the results of their feedback were shared with the groups, and used as fodder for a discussion on audience-appropriate messaging. Workshop participants also rated this exercise highest when asked to rate different sections of the workshop, giving it an average of 6.4 out of a 7 point Likert scale.