Thinking About How You Communicate

This exercise asks students to reflect on how to effectively express your work to a disciplinary audience. The aim is to encourage students to develop clear, concise, and organized modes of communication. This exercise can be used anytime.

Background

The goal of this exercise is to help you learn how to learn about your own learning and how to make adjustments to learn more effectively. This process, called 'metacognition,' has been shown to improve student success in all sorts of ways, including boosts in reading comprehension, exam performance, and problem-solving. This exercise gives you an opportunity to learn about your own learning and apply those lessons to your research project.

Purpose of the exercise

This exercise asks you to reflect on how to communicate effectively to a disciplinary audience. The aim is to encourage you to develop clear, concise, and organized modes of communication.

 

Instructions

Think about how you communicate ideas related to your research project.  Answer the following questions. Your answers do not need to be overly long, but you should try to provide enough detail so that you explain your responses.

 

1. What does effective communication look like? How do you know it is effective?
2. How does communicating with a disciplinary specific audience (biologists, chemists, engineers) differ from communication with other groups? Please give an example.
3. What's your process for organizing ideas and figuring out what is most important?
4. How do you determine if your message is clear and reaching your audience as you intend?