Key Findings

Findings on student communication

• The project found that students from the United States had statistically higher pre-scores for confidence than New Zealand students, indicating that students’ backgrounds may influence their communication confidence.
• The average change was positive and statistically significant, indicating that Communicate the Quake was successful at increasing students’ confidence when communicating.
• The project found changes were independent of students’ pre-scores, meaning that the scenario-based role-play was effective in changing confidence levels regardless of where they began.
• The changes observed over the course of a single, multi-hour intervention were on par with changes observed in the literature for interventions that occured over much longer time frames.

Findings on participants' perceptions

• The project compared participants’ perceptions of crisis communication to those of experts. (academics, emergency managers and science communicators) and found participants showed statistically significant positive shifts (ie, they had more agreement with experts).
• Several factors appeared to influence the level of change achieved such as students’ nationalities, their year of degree programme, and the scenario-based role-play team in which they were placed.
• Using 49 individual statements on different elements of science communication best practice, analysis showed that there were some best practices in which most student groups agreed with experts (showing high perceptions) and others which they disagreed with experts (showing low perceptions).
• There were several topics with which experts struggled with (ie, they gave predominantly neutral responses, with distributions leaning towards agreeing or disagreeing) that coincided with mixed and low perceptions from the student participants.
• These topics were comprehensiveness, showing the scientist’s emotions, political influence/agenda, use of formal language, and use of graphs and plots.
• The statements for which the emergency management professionals disagreed with the student groups were the ‘why’ of the crisis, discussing past crisis scenarios and the communication of probabilities.
• The topics were potentially important topics to explore further and understand.

Key Recommendations

• Communicate the value of scenario-based role-play | Share information to ensure practising geoscientists, engineers and emergency management professionals in the field understand more about scenario-based role-play and the benefits for communicating science to a wider audience.