Communicating Intuitively
The goal of this project was to examine the effects of intuitive language on understanding of science communications.
This research builds onto a previous study where we built and evaluated the NUCOREpus. The first study examined the usage of intuitive language in publicly available news and media articles about DNA.
This second study used the same articles, along with the information obtained regarding the language usage, to evaluate the impacts of using intuitive language in complex science communications about DNA and genetics.
Step 1
First, we built an online survey wherein participants were presented with one of the articles chosen. Then, they were asked to provide a summary of it followed by some general questions about DNA
Step 2
To quantify understanding, summary scoring guides were created for each article. Then, as a team we scored each summary and evaluated these scores against the participants’ self-reported understanding scores.
Following is the conference poster for this research:
