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Testing science capital and forming social capital

20 June 2024 at 8:15:00 am

T40 Talk

15 min

Abstract

Science Centres are a common cultural experience around the world, aiming to increase science engagement and understanding amongst their local communities. Many hope to have positive impacts on their visitors, but science centre evaluation is typically under-resourced, making long-term impact difficult to measure. Scitech Discovery Centre and the University of Western Australia has joined forces in a research collaboration to understand the impact of Scitech in the WA community, and the influence of childhood visits to Scitech on adults who’ve grown up in WA, using the lens of Science Capital. We’ll share early findings from the pilot project, as well as some of the learnings, challenges and opportunities of researcher-practitioner collaborative projects.

Presenter/s

Dr Heather Bray

Mrs Shanii Phillips

Relevance to conference themes

This talk will discuss a researcher-practitioner (or academia-industry) collaboration, which is often hinted at as important step forward in the science communication field, but often overlooked as "too hard" in reality.
We aim to discuss not only our initial findings and the aims of the project, but also the benefits of this research-practice collaboration and how to spot opportunities for others.

Not only is quality communication important between science communicators and non-science communicators - as a field, we also need to get better at bridging gaps between each other, and this project is an example of such.

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