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16th Year Celebration with TWIM Guests

53:15 recording · AUTO · 6 speakers

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Brief overview

A COVID-era stopgap became a published TWIM annotation e-book that measurably raises students' science literacy.

  1. A cancelled-internship problem became a national resourceNancy Bury had students with no summer 2020 internship and faculty with no online science-literacy materials, and solved one problem with the other.
  2. Annotation forces students to translate the scienceGroups rewrote figure legends and built their own learning objectives, which Petra called translating the science into English rather than repeating jargon.
  3. The gains are measured, not just feltBoth content knowledge and reading motivation rose with statistical significance around 0.002 on validated instruments across interns and classroom users.
Executive Summary AI
  • On TWIM's 16th-anniversary episode, recorded February 5th, 2026, Vincent Racaniello, Michael Schmidt, Michelle Swanson and Petra Levin host Nancy Bury of Iowa State University and Maggie Sharman of Washington University.0:47
  • Nancy explains the project began in spring 2020, when COVID cancelled the internships of half a dozen of her juniors and faculty were struggling to move science-literacy work online, so she turned TWIM episodes into annotation work and later brought in Becky Seipelt-Thiemann, Gwen Knapp and Amaya Garcia-Costas as co-leaders, aligning everything to Vision and Change and the ASM curriculum guideline13:09
  • Maggie ran it with her spring 2025 microbiology lab class, twelve groups of four who each picked a podcast, wrote consensus annotations tied to ASM fundamental statements, rewrote two figure legends in plain language and drafted questions and learning objectives — though she admits twelve groups was more than she could debrief properly.20:09
  • Nancy reports initial grant-funded assessment data showing statistically significant gains (around p = 0.002) in content knowledge on the Microbiology Concept Inventory and in every subcategory of a validated science reading motivation survey, with the research article about a third written.40:42
  • Roughly 51 fellows were trained to run the process with their students across community colleges, R1s and primarily undergraduate institutions, 99 TWIM episodes are already annotated, and the free open-access e-book is titled Podcast Annotation and Resources in Microbiology.44:53
Key Quote
“This begins our 16th year of TWIM.”
— Michael Schmidt0:47
Key Quote
“So a little bit of a jack-of-all-trades, master of none.”
— Nancy Bury4:06
Key Quote
“I potentially, if I'm going to be frank, bit off a little bit more than I could chew.”
— Maggie Sharman26:28