Abstract:

Research centers around the world publish more than 8000 articles per day. However, most of the new discoveries stay within the scientific community and never reach the rest of the society. In the best-case scenario, a short appearance in a newspaper or the T.V. transforms years of work in a “fun fact” about science. We propose to increase the audience and improve the quality of the communication about new findings by engaging high-school students in reduced versions of the projects from our research center: the Institute of Language, Communication, and the Brain (ILCB) of the Aix-Marseille University (France). The main idea is to select a particular discovery from our institute, elaborate a simpler but complete version of the research project and work on it with high-school students. This is what we did in collaboration with the “IES Calderón de la Barca” in Pinto (Madrid, Spain), where a first-year of “Bachillerato” student (upper secondary school, aged 16) elaborated a scientific project on speech perception under the supervision of an ILCB researcher. The goals of this proposal are not only to share the latest findings among high-school students, but also to introduce young students in science with a full research experience.

The project was focused on how changing different acoustic features affects our ability to understand speech, and which factors (multilingualism, music knowledge, age…) modulate our comprehension. This work revisited and complemented a recent publication where degradation of temporal and frequential information affected perception of speech and music, respectively. The student did bibliographic research, proposed new elements to include in the experiment, and collected and analyzed results from fifty participants. The project lasted 6 months, with regular meetings to supervise.

Overall, the student showed great interest during the development of the project, particularly when running the experiment. At the end of the academic year, the student was selected to defend the project in front of teachers and other students from the high-school. The good evaluations from the teachers confirmed the success of the proposal, with a special mention on how the student was able to link and present the personal work with high level investigations.

Keywords:

Language, Research in education, Research project, Neuroscience.