#SCIENCETECH: NEW STRATEGIES TO IMPROVE COMMUNICATIONS SKILLS FOR UNDERGRADUATE AND POSTGRADUATE STUDENTS

Progress and development on Science and Technology have a direct impact in our society, therefore it is important that young scientists learn how to communicate their achievement not only to specialise audience but also to a non-experts public. In this context, the goal of this paper is to present a methodology which provides a series of tools and resources for Bachelor, Master and Ph.D students who want to improve their oral and writing communication skills at the Science´s Faculty at Cadiz University.

This project was initially developed based on an innovation activity proposed by PhD students motivated to improve their abilities for science communication and interested on knowing the research lines and equipment available at the Science Faculty at Cadiz University. #ScienceTech project was created in order to offer a platform where students can work, in a friendly environment with researchers from different scientific fields from the same faculty, to improve not only their oral and writing capabilities but also to encourage them to be critic and to use a correct scientific language. Within the project, two main activities were offered to the students: #RedactaScienceTech, focused to improve writing skills and #InvestigaScienceTech dedicated to oral communication. The students after being registered through an on-line web-site1-2 were arranged into interdisciplinary teams with a maximum number of 6 students and two researchers.

#RedactaScienceTech, provides the participants with the necessary tools to write research papers in English. Every month, the students had a meeting with their team to work on the practical aspect of writing; special care was taken on the paper structure, scientific language, and clarity of the text. On the other hand, #InvestigaScienceTech, is focused on improving the oral communication skills of the participants. In this activity, taking into account the limited time of the presentation and the kind of audience (specialize and non-experts), the students learn how to design a presentation, to organize the contents and to maintain the interest of the audience. All these sessions were supervised by professors from the faculty, providing their expertise knowledge in the acquisition of these skills.

References:
[1] http://ciencias.uca.es/divulgacion/sciencetech/investigasciencetech
[2] http://ciencias.uca.es/divulgacion/sciencetech/redactaciencetech