SCI2010: Scientific Practice and Communication

Hurdle requirement – you need 30% of total marks on all in-semester assignments to pass the unit.

10% Participation
This includes attendance at workshops, participation in specific activities at some workshops (you’ll be told which workshops and which activities), completing 9 weekly quizzes, and completing online activities in weeks 4 and 8, in which there are no lectures or workshops. Pretty easy marks – just attend workshops, say something in the activities that are assessed, do the quizzes (which are only 5 questions each, and you’ll get full marks for attempting them, even if you don’t answer every question correctly) and do the online stuff during the online weeks.

5% Popular media article (due week 3)
This is the first part of a semester-long project. You’ll be presented with 12 broad topics to choose from. You pick one and with each assessment you do based on the topic, you’ll narrow down your topic until it is specific enough to write a literature review on. The first part of the project is writing a popular media article, by finding one journal article on your topic and “translating” it so that a non-science person would understand (like the articles in ABC Science and similar websites). This part doesn’t take too much time and is relatively simple, hence why it is only worth 5%. Most people tended to do well, because the marking criteria was pretty straightforward.

10% Annotated bibliography (due week 7)
This is the next part of the project. In this part, you read five journal articles and write a short summary and rating of them, based on how well they suit your research/writing needs for your more specific topic. In this part, I mainly struggled with actually finding articles, as I hadn’t really narrowed my topic down much and wasn’t really sure what I wanted to write about, so I was just scrolling through journal databases hoping for something related to my topic. However, overall it was an ok assessment. Some people seemed to struggle, based on our tutor’s comments, and forgot to do parts of the work (eg. forgetting a list of key words).

25% Literature review (due week 12)
This is the culmination of all the research that we had done over the semester – a 2000 word literature review on a specific topic, due in week 12. There is a formative (work 0% of marks) draft review due in week 10 that I would recommend trying to do a bit of, as you’re able to get comments from others in your workshop group and advice from your tutor. This is a pretty tough assignment, especially for those of us who hadn’t done a literature review before.

10% Oral presentation (week 5)
A group presentation in your workshop, where you find a popular media article, trace it back to the original journal article and discuss how well the media article accurately portrayed the science. It was sort of like the opposite of the written popular media article assignment. Expect the usual group project difficulties with this presentation – no one has a break at the same time, people haven’t done their share of the work etc... 2.5/10 marks are based only on your own communication/presentation skills, so group members can end up with different marks.

40% Exam
Hurdle requirement – you need 30% on the exam to pass the unit. 2 hour closed book exam. 40 multiple choice questions worth 60 marks in total, and 5 short/long answer questions, also worth 60 total marks. Pretty straightforward, standard exam. Some multiple choice questions came straight from the past exam, so I’d recommend completing that for revision if you can. Knowing a few of the examples (eg. one paradigm shift and one instance of a scientist being unethical) from the lectures in detail will be quite handy as well, as they often come up in the written questions.

Just giving a little update on DisaFear’s review, because some of the assessment weightings and details have changed a little bit!

The unit is divided up into three themes:
1.Science & science communication
2.Scientific principles & philosophy
3.Ethical & professional practice of science

As previously mentioned in other reviews of SCI2010 and SCI2015, some of the content is common sense knowledge or things that you might have picked up from other units. The lecture topics included scientific thinking, how to communicate science to others, the history of science, scientific revolutions/paradigm shifts, pseudoscience, the ethics of human and animal experimentation and careers. Overall, I felt it was well run, and Bronwyn was very responsive to Moodle messages and emails, especially around assignment due dates. All I can recommend is to not leave assignments to the last minute, especially as there are specific guidelines for uploading them to Moodle and you don’t want to lose marks for not uploading everything in its right place!
So in summary, most lecture content was straightforward and simple but dry at times, but the assignments were quite difficult and time-consuming.

Dr Bronwyn Isaac, Prof Roslyn Gleadow, Dr Rowan Brookes + a few others/guest lecturers

Yes, one. No answers .

3.5 out of 5

Yes, with screen capture & livestreaming available as well

There’s nothing you need to buy. There’s a mini textbook on Moodle (“Moodle Book”) that goes through the topics in a more detailed fashion.

2x1hr lectures, 1x2hr workshop

2018, Semester 2

Yes, a few. No answers available ( ) but Moodle is active

3.5/5

Yes, with screen capture

Don't even go there, the only thing from the two 'textbooks' are two diagrams or so, fully covered in the lecture notes

TBA