Goals and design of public physics lectures: perspectives of high-school students, physicsteachers and lecturers

Abstract

Many large scientific projects and scientific centres incorporate some kind of outreachprogramme. Almost all of these outreach programmes include public scientific lecturesdelivered by practising scientists. In this article, we examine such lectures from theperspectives of: (i) lecturers (7) who are practising scientists acknowledged to be goodpublic lecturers and (ii) audiences composed of high-school students (169) and high-schoolphysics teachers (80) who attended these lectures. We identify and discuss the maingoals as expressed by the lecturers and the audiences, and the correspondencebetween these goals. We also discuss how the lecturers’ goals impact on the designof their lectures and examine how the lecture affects audiences with differentattitudes towards (and interests in) physics. Our findings suggest that the goals ofthe participating lecturers and the expectations of their audiences were highlycongruent. Both believe that a good public scientific lecture must successfullycommunicate state-of-the-art scientific knowledge to the public, while inspiring interestin and appreciation of science. Our findings also suggest that exemplary publicscientific lectures incorporate content, structure and explanatory means thatexplicitly adhere to the lecturers’ goals. We identify and list several design principles.