Human Practices Summary

Background
Being a group that focuses on employing scientific concepts and techniques to synthesize products for industrial, environmental, and medical purposes, we are aware of the value and importance of understanding and utilizing scientific concepts for societal advancements. In recent years, the public distribution of scientific material has reached a new high. However, due to heavy scientific jargon, it can be difficult for the general public to properly interpret conclusions and significance from scientific publications. For this reason, along with the rise of “fake news”, the Human Practices Team has decided to promote scientific literacy alongside our research.

Goals
Our main goal was to survey the population in order to get a basic understanding of how people feel about interpreting and sharing science-based news. This initial survey helped us formulate questions which we then took to the experts. We then published a “how-to” infographic, inspired by our survey and interview results, about reading science-based news. Our survey contained ten questions to probe the public’s view on science-based news articles and their practices interpreting them. More than 250 people from diverse educational and cultural backgrounds filled out the survey. We were surprised with the results. We hypothesized that people with a post-secondary education would identify as feeling comfortable interpreting scientific results, but we found that that was not the case regardless of education level. In addition, we identified a population of respondents who would blindly share non-credible information over social media platforms. We consulted a variety of experts ranging from professional science communicators, science discipline professors, students, and members of the general public to get their perspectives on our survey results. For more details, please refer to the science communication page.

Outreach and Education
In addition to our science communication efforts, we concentrated on advocating scientific literacy amongst the Halifax community. A huge part of our work was geared towards getting young children and students engaged in science. We hosted several workshops collaborating with SHAD Valley, SuperNOVA summer camps at Dalhousie University, and the Discovery Centre. For each session, we devised simple scientific experiments that equipped participants with new laboratory techniques and ended with insightful discussions. For more details, please refer to the public engagement page.

Our Blog
We also developed the PLoSibilities blog to provide students a platform to practice science communication, and to provide the general public a place to read in simplified terms the latest scientific research. We are very proud of our partnership with PLoS in establishing our blog. For more details, please refer to the public engagement page.

Integrated Human Practices
Finally, we integrated many of the ideas we learned in the science communication portion of our human practises project into our overall design. We talked with experts to see how we could improve our project, and take it to the next level, we explored the safety of our project, and we met with a local fermentation company, BioVectra, to discuss how our idea could be commercialized. Furthermore, we put our science communication skills to the test and practiced presenting our project to different audiences. For more details, please refer to the integrated and gold page.