What is a Professional Communication Project?

Initial Publication Date: November 6, 2009

While the content, formatting, requirements, and procedures vary across the STEM disciplines, all professional scientists are expected to share their research questions, methods, expectations, goals, and findings with diverse populations within and beyond the scientific community.

Hurrican Ecology Student Presents Research at the April 2009 Louisiana Earth Day Festival

A Professional Communication Project is an assignment that asks students to effectively communicate scientific information within a particular genre, to a clearly defined audience, within a specified mode or modes. Genre refers to the product being generated (e.g. conference proposal); audience refers to the target group (e.g. conference submissions review committee); mode refers to the method used to convey the information (e.g. oral presentation, poster, written proposal, or a combination of several modes).

Scientific communication projects reflect each discipline's common core of conventions, traditions, and knowledge, and present a specialized set of representations, techniques, and ideas that is recognized and understood by members of the scientific discourse-community.

For example, practicing scientists are regularly expected to produce the following products:

  • Conference abstracts and presentations
  • Scientific posters and participation in poster sessions
  • Articles in peer-reviewed scholarly journals
  • Grant proposals and annual reports
  • Project plans
  • Public outreach documents (fact sheets, editorials, press releases, web sites, etc)

Teaching assignments like these increase the college's effectiveness with two foundational objectives for undergraduate education:

1) acquisition and retention of content-knowledge,
2) professional development for students.

"Students taking my CxC course in Conservation Biology are learning as much from each other as they are from me, so from their perspective it is as if there are 35 instructors in class, instead of just one!

Additionally, CxC has helped me make even more of a shift than I had been making on my own from traditional, lecture-style instruction towards hands-on, active participation by students. That shift has helped me focus more directly on the key concepts that provide students with a foundation from which to explore the details of specific cases that confront or interest them. I help provide the foundation, while students apply it to myriad specific cases."

– Kyle Harms, LSU Associate Professor of Biological Sciences, on how the CxC model has improved both student learning and his own pedagogical practices.