Communication and dissemination competences are essential for future professionals in order to disseminate technical and research information. In higher education, the competences expected of students include, on the one hand, the ability to analyse and interpret relevant data in order to make judgements that include reflection on technical, scientific, social or ethical issues, and, on the other hand, the ability to disseminate information, ideas, problems and solutions to both specialist and non-specialist audiences. The first competence is related to critical thinking, which has received a great deal of attention at university level. However, efforts have been concentrated on technologies or skills for communication, but the selection of the appropriate contents to be communicated and to structure them has been neglected. This has been demonstrated after analysing the results of the application of the teaching innovation project PBL+ to engineering students, from undergraduate to master, during 5 years (courses 2019-2020 to 2023-2024). PBL+ is a teaching-learning methodology based on Problem Based Learning (PBL), but incorporating other methodologies; in short, it consists of the students solving real problems of a real company, with the peculiarity that there must be a direct contact between the student and a manager of the company. An important part of the activity is to communicate the most relevant findings for solving the problem to the company and to an academic audience. The communication was done through a written document, face-to-face presentation and through a social network. The evaluation of the PBL+ activity showed that only 25% of the students correctly selected the content for the written document and 20% for the face-to-face presentation, while 35% selected adequate content for dissemination on social networks (X and Instagram). These values are considered low, especially since the excellence of the technical solutions chosen by the students to solve the problem and their economic viability obtained better results, since between 65% and 75% of the students obtained the maximum score out of three levels for technical excellence and economic viability, but they failed in communicating the findings. At the same time, we found that even if PhD students are able to obtain good data from experimental research and to evaluate such a data correctly by statistical analysis, they are not competent in communicating the results in a written academic paper, usually the papers are poorly structured. The causes have been analysed and two reasons emerge as the most relevant: the first one is the lack of training during the undergraduate and master's degrees on the importance of selecting the content to be communicated; at best, they receive training in communication skills, but what about the ability to select the content to be communicated? The second reason is the students' lack of confidence in the validity of the results of their work and the lack of confidence in the usefulness of such results. In the paper we propose activities to improve the competences related to the correct selection of contents for communication. In essence, students need to be trained to separate the important from the superfluous, to create a logical structure and a thread running through the story.

Keywords: STEM, results communication, PBL+, content selection.