Drug Scene Investigators

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DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The objective of "Drug Scene Investigators" is to educate middle school students about the biology of drugs of abuse through the use of a problem-solving game in which students carry out research in a simulated real-life situation. This game involves a multidisciplinary approach that is designed to make material comprehensible to a diverse group of learners. It partners established methods and theories used by many groups-methods shown to be effective in educating young people-but rarely employed together in a widely-available medium for a demographically diverse audience. These are: Cooperative Learning, Literacy Scaffolding, Feedback Learning, and Language of Experience. We propose to: 1) create the user interface for "Drug Scene Investigators", a highly interactive, literacy-scaffolded, multiple reading level game for teaching middle school students about the neuroscience and biology of the drugs of abuse through Feedback learning, case-presentation and cooperative learning, 2) create case histories for "Drug Scene Investigators" told in the language of experience that illustrate situations befalling a wide demographic of individual drug users, and develop drug information pages for "Drug Scene Investigators" that cover each of the major drug classes on the NIDA website, 3) implement the "Drug Scene Investigators" game for use in classrooms, and 4) use students and teachers in middle school classrooms to obtain feedback and evaluate the feasibility of using "Drug Scene Investigators" to improve understanding of drugs of abuse. Our hypothesis is that the principles of cooperative learning, literacy scaffolding, feedback learning, and the language of experience can be combined in the context of a motivational, computer-based game to help improve student understanding of drug abuse in a way that fosters critical thinking and reduces the achievement gap often seen with minority or economically disadvantaged students. Students will interact with this game by studying a case, viewing a scene, doing experiments, examining lab data, recording useful information, reading drug information pages, and, based on the information, deciding if an assigned drug is involved with the case. Outcomes will be evaluated in 26 schools and 3900 middle school students. We expect the project will contribute to improving the education of our youth, not only with respect to improved comprehension of drug abuse sciences, but to other areas of life science. What we propose to create can become a model for web-based learning that can be made widely available to schools and the general public and become an important tool for enhancing understanding of drug abuse.