One demand imposed by the global market is the possession of adequate soft skills, a challenge commonly faced by STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) graduates. This challenge is particularly prominent in China, which produces millions of STEM graduates annually. Consequently, there is a pressing need to develop and research programs facilitating the acquisition of soft skills, with a specific focus on teamwork, among Chinese engineers. To this end, we created a team-based project as part of a semester-long scientific English communication course at a Sino–foreign STEM university in China. The project aimed at fostering valuable soft skills through active learning, including teamwork, communication, and collaboration. In this report, we examine written reflections by students, aiming to assess their perceptions of soft skill development and overall experience resulting from their participation in the team-based project. Our results show the self-reflected soft skills development was considerable, and, unexpectedly, a noteworthy outcome of the project was the significant development of interpersonal connections, resulting in a positive experience and friendship development. Consequently, the findings of this study shed light on how teamwork can foster soft skills and friendship development, the latter often referred to as relationship development, another soft skill in the 21st century.

Scientists increasingly use generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) to aid in science communication tasks due to limited time and resources. GenAI can function as a writing assistant, idea generator, or collaborative tool. While it offers promising support, it is crucial to address potential pitfalls, such as misinformation due to its stochastic nature, dependency on prompt specificity, and the risk of reproducing biases and stereotypes. To mitigate these issues, scientists should be trained in competencies that foster ethical and effective interactions with GenAI, ensuring they develop what we call “Good Working Habits” for science communication with GenAI.

Curiosity and question-asking are at the heart of science and engineering education. However, question-asking can be difficult for students due to several factors, including fear, language barriers, and cultural norms. This is especially true among Chinese students, who represent a growing number of upcoming engineers. To address this, in this case study from a university teaching reform project, we investigate the perceptions of curiosity and question-asking among Chinese science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) undergraduate students following a newly developed semester-long project in a second-year communications course at a recently established Sino-foreign engineering school in China. In this period, students engaged in project-based learning centered around Nobel Prize-winning research, allowing them to explore the driving questions behind groundbreaking discoveries. Through a combination of qualitative analyses from students’ personal reflections as well as from a post-survey, the study examines students’ perceptions of curiosity and question-asking, the influence of gender on these skills, and the role of failure and perseverance in scientific inquiry. Findings indicate that the project increased students’ curiosity and improved their confidence in asking questions while providing insights into gender differences. Moreover, students were inspired by the curiosity of the Nobel Laureates, by the “simplicity” of the questions asked, and by the great importance of tenacity, passion, and learning from mistakes.

About the case: We suggest using Aristotle's rhetorical triangle, a tool for analyzing communication in terms of logos (logic), pathos (values), and ethos (identity), in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) undergraduate classes. We investigate how the triangle can enhance students’ communication skills by developing awareness of pathos and ethos, and shed light on values, considerations, and professional identity at different stages of their studies. Situating the case: Developing communication skills among STEM students is imperative even in the age of AI-based tools. Although many books and platforms exist to help facilitate communication in general, STEM students require practical tools to foster the rhetorical skills needed for effective and persuasive communication. Methods: The rhetorical triangle intervention was implemented in two undergraduate courses to help students develop the other necessary elements of effective communication beyond logos: i.e., pathos and ethos. Results: Our results show that the intervention enhanced students’ ability to express shared values (pathos) with their audience and fostered the development of professional identity (ethos). Our findings also revealed notable differences in professional identity expression when comparing two different samples of future scientists and engineers in their freshmen and senior years. Conclusion: We suggest that incorporating the elements of the rhetorical triangle into STEM education can enhance students’ communication skills, particularly in expressing the value of their work and developing a strong professional identity. We recommend integrating these elements throughout various stages of the curriculum to deepen students’ understanding of effective communication and persuasion.

The ability to carefully craft writing for an intended audience is crucial in creating persuasive rhetorical arguments. Learning to do so requires knowledge beyond IMRaD (Introduction, Methods, Results, Discussion). Many graduate students learn by mimicking this structure, yet lack audience awareness and overuse jargon, producing low-readability texts. What is more, they increasingly rely on AI-based writing tools that mimic the same structures that are already often poorly written. The results are too often uncommunicative articles that fail to persuade the intended audience. Therefore, we suggest writing pedagogy includes a deeper understanding of effective written science communication using the rhetorical triangle. As graduate students most readily understand the importance of logos, i.e., the scientific content, our job as writing instructors should be to emphasize the role a carefully aimed pathos and ethos plays in producing highly readable, persuasive, publishable articles. To this end, this paper first presents a brief background on the IMRaD structure before outlining the much-overlooked role of the rhetorical triangle in scientific writing. Specifically, we offer a detailed table for graduate students to use in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM).

The science of humor in persuasion has been examined in many fields, including business, the US Supreme court, and advertising. However, humor is rarely associated with scientific discourse, a discourse which aims to be persuasive and is traditionally viewed as objective. Nonetheless, humor can be found in informal exchanges in popularized science and even more formal settings such as in academic publications. Specifically, this article explores the understudied rhetorical and heuristic functions of humor in the scientific debate about the foundations of quantum mechanics, i.e., the ontological narrative about the nature of the physical reality, a subject typically associated with logos based arguments. We demonstrate our analysis on the case study of a leading physicist, John S. Bell, specifically his famous academic article “Against ’Measurement’” (1990) in which the use of humor is ubiquitous. We apply Olbrechts-Tyteca’s approach to the comic dimensions of disocurse and French discourse analyst Charaudeau’s approach to humor as a discursive strategy to several humorous acts in Bell’s article and show how and why humor is part of the persuasive strategy of his discourse. We argue that humorous processes based on irony, paradox, and parody (among others) are used to disqualify tenets of “orthodox” quantum mechanics and overcome a taboo around debating the foundations of quantum mechanics, thereby fostering scientific progress.