Using Infographic Creation as Tool for Science-Communication Assessment and a Means of Connecting Students to Their Departmental Research

Students were asked to each create an infographic on the basis of one of their host department’s research articles as a new exercise within the “science communication” training program of the University of Leicester’s undergraduate chemistry degree. The use of local articles helped to connect students to the research of their lecturers, and the assignment helped to contextualize why certain lecturers had been chosen to teach their allocated subjects. Students also agreed that the activity helped them to recognize what research is associated with the traditional inorganic-, organic-, and physical-chemistry lecture themes. There was some benefit to this approach in helping students distill out key information.