News . Best Practices Developing Science Communication Skills – a persuasive poster about Rewilding to protect the environment to display on the science noticeboard (Best Practice UK)

Care: Rewilding was introduced as a problem to engage students and encourage discussion about how to protect the environment by reintroducing lost animal species back to ecosystems. The activities were developed with a researcher in Science and the schools’ Biology teachers. Participants were 30 students who contributed to discussions about rewilding and planned a campaign to persuade the public of the benefits of rewilding different animal species.  

Know: to decide which animal should be reintroduced, they learned and applied knowledge about ecosystems and interdependence as well as practicing devising questions, visual communication, data analysis and the enquiry skill of weighing up evidence to support a claim. They also used maths skills to prepare graphs and geographic information about habitat.  

Do: Students interacted with family members to vote on the animal to be rewilded and prepared a persuasive poster using argumentation skills based on data and facts. 

Findings: The “weigh evidence to support a claim” was tricky for lower ability pupils to fill in. They had great difficulty distinguishing between a SCIENTIFIC QUESTION and a CLAIM. The activities were useful to identify that some students need more support to analyse data. Their ability to use i-pads to do further independent research on each animal was useful. The information sheets were clear although they had difficulty in analysing the scatter graph. Lack of time was a factor due to curriculum pressures and impending exams. The final presentation task would have taken several lessons to complete, which wasn’t possible, so they adapted the materials and instead made a persuasive poster to display in the Science department.  

Outcome: The teachers reported that they felt the objective to improve students’ interest and confidence in science was met very well and the children were interested in the context.

Ten students, between the ages of thirteen and fourteen, contributed to this open schooling research questionnair. Most students said that learning science will be useful in their daily lives, as well as that they feel confident using science to come up with questions and ideas, in addition, all of them said that they think learning science is fun. The data collected also shows that almost half of the students don’t feel confident with their knowledge in science.

More details of our report: on this link.