Style and Substance
Authors:   , Sterk Florentine Marnel 
Published: December 2024

Popularization skills enable students of interdisciplinary programs to make the insights from their research projects have a bigger impact, outside of university walls. These students need to navigate communicating both disciplinary and interdisciplinary terminology, methodology, and research results. Moreover, communication to non-expert audiences is an important skill both for future academic and professional careers. Yet popularization training is not a standard part of university training and an underdeveloped topic in the academic literature, including a lack of studies into the effectiveness of educational material and the effects of training on students. The aim of this thesis is to explore how students of interdisciplinary undergraduate programs can best be enabled to learn to write popularization discourse about their own interdisciplinary research for a non-expert audience.

To acquire insight into interdisciplinary students’ popularization skills, self-perception of abilities, and learning experiences, methodological options from communication sciences and educational sciences were used. They include text analysis, analytic framework construction, baseline assessment, video analysis, keystroke logging, questionnaires, statistical analysis, and thematic analysis.

This study shows that students enter their undergraduate interdisciplinary program with a range of popularization skills and the ability to produce a recontextualized setting. Yet their texts lack a newspaper structure and show problems with information presentation. Students’ use of popularization strategies is hampered by a lack of popularization discourse knowledge and academic discourse knowledge. Third-year students’ popularization writing processes are diverse, with variations in the number of switches between processes, the amount and depth of editing, the use of internet, the reliance on the source text, and the number and duration of pauses. Yet the writing products show little variation between first-year and third-year writing. Diversity in the writing process thus does not lead to diversity in the product, and popularization writing skills hardly improve over time in an academic training setting. A single training session in popularization writing skills already provides interdisciplinary students with more knowledge of the genre of popularization discourse. Yet consistent training and more opportunities for practice are needed to put the acquired new knowledge in practice and to create real improvement in students’ skills, and concurrently in attitudes.

Students of interdisciplinary programs can best be enabled to learn popularization skills through training that includes knowledge development through explicit teaching of the genre of popularization and of the presentation of disciplinary and interdisciplinary perspectives in popularizations, skills development through structural writing assignments and assessment, attitudinal change through structural attention to popularization, and educational materials that include the use of examples, reflection, peer review, and collaboration.

This thesis added to the academic knowledge base by delineating the genre of popularization discourse in the form of text strategies, by performing a longitudinal baseline assessment of written popularization skills in university students, and by considering the design principles necessary for effective popularization training for interdisciplinary university students. It also put forward an analytic framework for popularization discourse that can be used as a guideline in writing and two rubrics with which to assess popularization discourse.