Science Festival and Science Communication: A Case Study for the April 1997's Science Month in Korea

과학축전과 과학커뮤니케이션 : 1997년 4월‘과학의 달’행사를 중심으로

The purposes of this study are first, to plan communication strategies for promoting the 1st National Science Festival and other events of the April 1997's Science Month in Koreas; second, to monitor communication activities done for those events; third, to evaluate effects of communication activities. Both the Ministry of Science and Technology and the Korea Science Foundation were arranged to execute our planned communication strategies. Basically we utilized the three sequences of human behavioral condition : Exposure, attention, and cognition. For planning, we suggested concrete communication strategies for each sequence, for example, first, those for bringing exposure to every event, second, those for bringing attention to the event, and third, those for bringing cognition of the event. Those communication strategies were suggested to use specifics of newspapers, television programs, radio programs, commercial and corporate magazines, electric visual sign advertisements on the street, and computer communication. For monitoring and evaluation, we used the same three sequences as the criteria. For example, we monitored and evaluated how much exposure, attention or cognition an event got or which specific medium contributed to exposure to, cognition of an event. For monitoring, graduate students were dispatched to examine each event through watching and interviewing. For evaluation, about 950 of event participants and non-participants were surveyed by means of face-to-face interview. Overall, we found that newspaper articles and television programs contributed a lot to people's exposure to events of the April 1997's Science Month. Especially, newspaper played a major role of heightening exposure. However, most events and/or their science and technology content failed to get salient attention and its following active cognition. The 1st National Science Festival attracted much exposure, but had some problems of disorder and commercialism. This sharp increase of exposure and some attention were believed to have reinforced people's, especially event participants' positive opinion of science and technology which is part of scientific culture.