It's here: Annenberg/CCP "Evidence-based Science Filmmaking Initiative"
As the 14 bilion readers of this blog can attest, when I say I'm going to do something "tomorrow" or "Monday" or "soon" or "June 31"-- I'm not kidding around: I mean "tomorrow" or "Monday" or "soon" or "June 31" or whatever the heck I said.
So just as promised "yesterday" [not counting the weekend] & foreshadowed "not so long ago" [the conjugate of "soon"] ...
Here is CCP's new Evidence-based Science Filmmaking Initiative! (aka "Science of science filmmaking" initiative--title soon to be put to a vote on this site)!
I'm not going to say a lot at this point. For one thing, there's plenty of material emanating from the "project page," so you can just poke around yourself all day on your own.
Also there's the Initiative's first "Report." It describes the results of a big preliminary study aimed at investigating the "Missing Audience Hypothesis" (a conjecture that was in fact featured in an earlier blog post and that provoked a pretty interesting discussion).
The study had all kinds of cool things in it, including a "Science Curiosity Scale" (SCS) which was self-consciously designed to remedy (or at least start to remedy) the defects in existing measures. As discussed previously in this blog (as I've mentioned innumerable times, I am loath to repeat myself in my posts, but I'll make an exception here), existing "science curiosity" measures are dominated by ill-formulated self-report items that exihibit lousy psychometric performance and have that never been shown to predict behavior evincing an interest in science.
Our "SCS" index includes some self-report measures (discretely bundled in with numerous other types of items of the sort that one might expect to see if one were participating in consumer-marketing survey), but it combines them them with performance and behavioral ones.
To validate SCS, we--the ESFI science filmmaking professionals and "science of science communication" researchers who collaborated on this study-- assessed its power to predict the level of subject engagement (also behaviorally measured) with a segment of a cool science documentary, Your Inner Fish, produced by ESFI collaborator Tangled Bank Studios.
The study also found some other really really cool things, including how engagement interacted with "belief in" evolution and science comprehension.
But I'll spare you the details.
Why? Because they are summarized in the "project pages," and spelled out in even greater detail in the Report, which of course, you can download!
I'll also say more on various of these matters in subsequent posts, which will supplement the analyses and interpretations in the project pages and Report.
In case you haven't noticed, I'm loath ever to repeat myself in this blog. So I will hold back for now.
And say more "tomorrow."
But by all means, feel free to offer your own views on any of the materials that appear in the Report or the sections of the site dedicated to ESFI, whose members consist of a both accomplished science science communication professionals and and empirical researchers all eager to explore the integration of the science of science communication into the craft of science filmmaking..
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