Social media is riddled with memes (i.e., captioned images intended to convey cultural ideas or beliefs) that often promote maladaptive and unsupported beliefs about human development and parenting. This paper presents a scientific writing assignment designed to help spread accurate information on human development beyond the classroom through creation and sharing of original material on social media. Students were tasked with identifying applicable themes of the course, transforming these themes into scientific memes with supporting research articles, posting these materials to social media, and reflecting on their experiences. This assignment helps students develop critical thinking and scientific literacy, as well as their ability to apply course concepts to everyday life and share those applications with others. Student outcomes from several sections of Lifespan Development—those with the scientific meme assignment versus those with a traditional writing assignment—were analyzed for differences in quantitative measures of student success (i.e., grades). Students’ written reflections were also assessed for common themes. Findings suggest advantages of social media assignments with regard to students’ sense of purpose, experience with scholarly discourse, and student growth, and may inspire creation of additional innovative assignments that promote student learning and application.

中文翻译：

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科学模因：使用社交媒体语言提高终生发展中的科学素养和交流

社交媒体充斥着模因（即旨在传达文化思想或信仰的带标题的图像），这些模因通常会宣扬关于人类发展和育儿的适应不良和不受支持的信念。本文介绍了一项科学写作作业，旨在通过在社交媒体上创建和共享原始材料，帮助在课堂之外传播有关人类发展的准确信息。学生的任务是确定课程的适用主题，将这些主题转化为带有支持研究文章的科学模因，将这些材料发布到社交媒体，并反思他们的经历。这项作业帮助学生培养批判性思维和科学素养，以及他们将课程概念应用于日常生活并与他人分享这些应用程序的能力。对来自终身发展的几个部分的学生成果进行了分析，即科学模因作业与传统写作作业的学生成果在学生成功的定量测量（即成绩）上的差异。学生的书面反思也被评估为共同主题。研究结果表明，社交媒体作业在学生的目标感、学术话语经验和学生成长方面具有优势，并可能激发创造额外的创新作业，以促进学生的学习和应用。