ESPLAT 2025 conference: Scientific thinking in challenging times

Ideally, student theses are not only written in order to gain academic degrees, but also to provide (modest) contributions to scientific and social issues. In times of abundant information – and misinformation – in digital and social media one such contribution is to effectively communicate evidence-based scientific results to the public. The project KLARPsy, initiated by the Leibniz Institute for Psychology (ZPID) in Germany, pursues this aim by hosting short, generally understandable and guideline-based text summaries of scientific meta-analyses and by instructing the scientific community how to participate. In the context of B.Sc. theses in the psychology degree program of the FernUniversität in Hagen, Germany, a large distance learning university, in the summer term 2025 we apply a newly-developed didactic approach, involving students (N = 20) in the creation of KLARPsy texts about various psychological topics. The main didactic elements are: (a) standardized guidelines listing and explaining the required milestones from initial text research to writing the final thesis, (b) accompanying feedback by the supervisor, (c) mutual peer-feedback on the drafts of KLARPsy texts. The creation of KLARPsy texts involves a step-wise interplay between psychologists (students and supervisors) and external raters from a broader public: (1) Pre-Screening of eligible meta-analyses (psychologists), (2) first rating of covered topics regarding interest and relevance (public), (3) in-depth eligibility and feasibility rating of meta-analyses (psychologists), (4) creation of KLARPsy texts (psychologists), (5) evaluation of created texts according to target criteria, e.g., comprehensibility (public), (6) revision of created KLARPsy texts (psychologists). We present the didactic concept, its implementation and first empirical data regarding the quality of student-generated KLARPsy texts as compared to existing KLARPsy texts created by trained psychologists. As an outlook, we discuss whether actively participating in the project KLARPsy has an impact on how B.Sc. students perceive the role of science communication in our society.