Mark Sarvary (Cornell): A Foundation, not an Afterthought School of Psychology and Neuroscience Friday seminar series

The School of Psychology and Neuroscience seminar series presents a talk by Mark Savary titled “A Foundation, not an Afterthought: Using Evidence-based Pedagogies to Integrate Science Communication Training into the STEM Curriculum”, which will be hosted by Dr Paula Miles in person in Seminar Room 1 in the School of Psychology and Neuroscience, and online through MS Teams.

Mark Sarvary is an education researcher in biology and science communication. He is a Senior Lecturer at the Department of Neurobiology and Behavior and the Director of the Investigative Biology Teaching Laboratories at Cornell University. He prepares undergraduates to become scientists and trains graduate and undergraduate teaching assistants using modern pedagogical techniques. His research in education directly informs his teaching, empowering students to build agency, sustain motivation, manage expectations, and develop essential transferable skills including critical thinking, science communication, and scientific literacy.

Abstract:
College undergraduates are no longer just consumers; they are also producers of scientific information. Sharing these scientific discoveries with the public is not only the responsibility of professional communicators but also a necessary skill for all scholars. Employers and postgraduate programs are showing increasing interest in undergraduates with advanced communication and interpersonal skills. The “Vision and Change in Undergraduate Biology” (AAAS, 2011) identified communication as one of the core competencies. Therefore, science communication education should not be a postgraduate afterthought but a foundation of undergraduate STEM education. Science communication training can help students understand the scientific process, become science literate, identify the role of science in society, and shape their interdisciplinary perspectives. Teaching science communication can take many forms: extracurricular student clubs, one-day workshops, activities integrated into STEM courses, semester-long courses focused on communication, or institute-wide undergraduate minors or majors. Regardless of the format, instructors should employ evidence-based teaching practices. With the advancement of educational research, it became clear that students learn better through engagement, and science communication includes many applied components that can be taught using these active learning techniques. This talk will explore the use of these approaches in science communication education at Cornell University.