Post on 16-Aug-2015
John Archie Pollock, Ph.D. Professor • Biological Sciences
Co-Director of the Chronic Pain Research Consortium Director of the Partnership in Education
www.duq.edu/pain • www.sepa.duq.edu
How People Learn: Stories from Transmedia for STEM and Health Literacy
Outline
Motivation – Sharing science with the general public creates learning opportunities – But there’s a problem
Process – Why telling stories matters – How to focus on Fundamental Principles – Knowing your audience
What we have learned – Narrative matters – Visual learning is strong
But what is the problem?
– Let’s think about science literacy in our country.
– How science literacy impacts health literacy.
Motivation !‘Two Cultures’ - C. P. Snow Rede Lecture - Two Cultures, 1959.
‘Scholarship of Integration’ - Ernest Boyer Scholarship Reconsidered: Priorities of the Professoriate. The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, 1990.
The Scientist/Communicator can add a useful dimension to the discussion and teaching of science.
The story is out there:
2009!
1995!
Chris Mooney makes the point that: People integrate new information based on their pre-existing worldviews, and that failure to account for this fact will lead to continued failures in science communication.
Science literacy among adults.
J.D. Miller (2010) Adult science learning in the Internet era - 2010. Curator, 53, 191- 208.
But only 28% could read the New York Times - Science or understand NOVA
Civic Scientific Literacy, 1988–2008.
National Assessment of Adult Literacy (NAAL)!http://nces.ed.gov/naal/!
1992
90 million adults score in the lowest categories
2003
110 million adults score in the lowest categories
Weak health literacy costs the U.S. health care system at least $240 billion/yr.
The below basic person is not necessarily below basic in all
assessment categories.
Below Basic Basic Intermediate Proficient
Prose 50 33 15 2 Document 51 29 18 1 Quantitative 61 26 11 2
Percent adults with Below Basic health literacy
Health Literacy!
2 1/2 million years ago
1 1/2 million years ago
Simple Stone Tools
Recent discovery of 150 tools from 3.3 million years ago
– Humans have been telling stories and listening for a million years.
– Humans love a good story.
Lots of time and lots of climate variation.
www.ngdc.noaa.gov/paleo/ctl and www.koshland-science-museum.org
Mt. Toba Explodes
But there is more than just weather. *!404 ppm!
X!
So what’s next after Mt. Toba & the Genetic Bottleneck …
Telling stories with pictures that last a long time…
that are extremely accurate.!
that animate the event.!
Bhimbetka, India
and make us really wonder.!
Then it warmed up.
10,000 years ago
The warm-up gave us a chance to adapt:
Cultivation - spreading seeds
Selective breeding - desirable traits
Cities
Çatalhöyük - a city 9,000 years ago (Turkey) – Thousands of people – Cultivate wheat
This is an artist’s impression of Çatalhöyük. Image credit: Dan Lewandowski
Things began to happen fast
5,000 to 8,000 years ago an age of invention Riding horse Wheel & plow Sail Written language
Beer recipe 5,100 years ago
The British Museum
Writing took off:
Epic of Gilgamesh (4,100 years ago) Hammurabi’s laws (3,800 years ago) Egyptian Book of the Dead (3,500 years ago) Torah (Pentateuch) (2,800 years ago)
But the Scientific Method by Descartes and others about 400 years ago…
Musée du Louvre!
So what do I think:
With a million years of evolution, our brains are wired to tell and listen to stories.
We are not necessarily wired to read. We have to learn that.
We are not necessarily wired to think critically about science and health.
We have to learn that.
What to do?
Tell stories
Use great visuals (scientifically accurate)
Follow fundamental principles that relate to your audience
Reinforce the message across media platforms
Challenge your audience to actually read
Example #1:
Here is the challenge:
Kids who receive an organ transplant frequently fail to take their medicines.
32% among kidney recipients 31% among liver recipients 16% among heart recipients
Many kids die.
Dobbels et al Pediatr Transplant (2005) Nevins Pediatr Transplant (2002) Griffin Elkin Pediatr Transplant (2001) Rianthavorn et al Transplantation (2004)
Focus on Fundamental Principles
Example #1: Understanding medications significantly increases self-responsibility among heart recipients.
McAllister et al Prog Transplant (2006)
Example #1:
Teach patients about Prograf (anti-rejection drug).
Among other things, they need to know about:
• IL-2 • T-Cells • Immune System – relevant cell biology • Central Dogma – DNA RNA Protein
What we did.
Lawrence, Stilley, Pollock, Webber, Quivers (2011)
Promoting Independence and Adherence in Pediatric Heart Transplantation.
Progress in Transplantation, vol. 21, 1, March 2011, pg 61-66.
PMID: 21485944
What we did.
Started with a booklet designed by university hospitals.
Create a patient survey based on booklet In the form of a comic book Flip Books – for things that move or change Places to write comments and questions Places to doodle
The comic book was then turned into a simple animated video story.
What we have learned.
• Children – Average Improvement 64%
– Range of improvement -8% to 300%
• Parent – Average Improvement 7%
– Range of improvement -19% to 53.8%
Before! After!
1! 2! 3! 4! 5! 6! 7! 8! 9!
1.0!
2.0!1.5!
0.5!0.0!
2.5!
Question No.!
Mea
n sc
ore!
What’s Next: A new video game on the immune system.
Video Games on the Immune System
• It’s NOT a Battle Zone!
• The immune system is a vast distributed intelligence.
• The immune system collects information and makes decisions.
Example #2:
game should have progressive difficulty
students want more complex objectives
splinter is boring
What we have learned.
What’s Next: A new video game on the immune system – take 2.
“game is fun because it is really difficult”
students appreciated being able to pause and read about their characters (the immune cells) and then got better at game play
students learned about the immune system
What we have learned.
What’s Next: A board game.
An Experiment:
Wilson, Gonzalez, Pollock (2012)
Evaluating learning and attitudes on tissue engineering: A study of children viewing animated digital dome shows detailing the biomedicine of tissue engineering.
Tissue Engineering (Part A), vol 18, no. 5 576-586. PMID: 21943030
Knowledge item: Item type: % Correct Before Show:
% Correct After Show:
1. What is a stem cell? Multiple choicea
28 76
3. Is there blood in your bones? Yes/No 41 97
6. What does extracellular matrix mean? Multiple choicea
13 68
Did children learn from the film?
Children’s drawings on the survey.
Wilson, Gonzalez & Pollock (2012) Evaluating learning and attitudes on tissue engineering: A study of children viewing animated digital dome shows detailing the biomedicine of tissue engineering. Tissue Eng Part A. 2011 Sep 26. [Epub ahead of print] PMID: 21943030
children learned from a single exposure
children learned equally well from both styles Though they prefer animated characters telling the story
children learned to visualize and draw new complex systems
What we have learned.
What’s Next: Facing the fundamental principles of evolution head-on.
Part of Darwin2009: A Pittsburgh Partnership www.sepa.duq.edu/darwin
Art and Science: Spiral of Life
Example #5:
Example #5:
The challenge:
www.pewforum.org/files/2013/12/Evolution-12-30.pdf
Influenced by religion and politics: 43% of Republicans believe in evolution versus 67% of Democrats
Public Views About Human Evolution
Script by David Lampe
Developed with ETC
Darwin Synthetic Interview
Also used in Pittsburgh Public School
(enrollment ~27,000)
Post-Survey Total respondents: n=3954
“Ask Darwin!” A Synthetic Darwin Interview. A museum interactive kiosk installed in the Carnegie Science Center.
First depiction of a tree-like diagram. Charles Darwin's notes 1837.
Darwin had one: All Life is connected by common ancestors
We need an image for Evolution
70 % (n=3476) reported ‘satisfied’ to ‘very satisfied’ with their level of enjoyment, learning, and information
48% were able to correctly identify where humans evolved, even though humans were not explicitly marked on the image.
“Please identify the region with the origin of life.”
What we have learned.
70 % (n=3476) reported ‘satisfied’ to ‘very satisfied’ with their level of enjoyment, learning, and information
48% were able to correctly identify where humans evolved, even though humans were not explicitly marked on the image.
“Please identify the region with the origin of life.”
What we have learned.
What’s Next: let’s see what we can learn from television.
Aviary Science Center
Zoo
Correct Position 60.30% 29.63% 24.30%
Top Left/Top Middle 12.50% 38.00% 42.90%
Sample size (n) 976 1080 3584
A television show pilot for PBS.
Kids explore science. Broadcast September 2010 WQED•Pittsburgh
A story of broken bones and much more…
Creator – John Pollock Executive Producers – John Pollock & David Caldwell Produced in collaboration with Planet Earth Television
Audiences surprise us with some bits of knowledge, but people almost always mess up how big is big.
Brief step back: Other things that we have learned along the way…
We also find:
Significant Increase:
• Kid’s belief that science helps them understand what they see around them.
• Willingness to find an expert and ask them questions.
Ulna?
An hour-long special for Public Television.!
Kids explore science.!
Focus on SLEEP!National Broadcast 2014/2015!
What’s Next: Let’s build and adaptive, branched, interactive e-reader/e-book.
Transmedia with rich visual and strong narrative can help:
• improve reading literacy and engage the aliterate
• improve science literacy and spur curiosity about everyday science
• add new dimensions to problem solving skills
• can strengthen visual understanding of complex systems