A Collaborative Approach to Real-World Science in the Classroom

描述（由申请人提供）：让学生在高中阶段就参与生物医学科学是培养具有科学素养的公民的关键的第一步，也是启动最终导致生物医学和健康相关专业人员数量增加的管道的第一步。该提案是塔夫茨大学医学院的生物医学科学家、麦迪逊公园技术和职业高中的生物教师、波士顿拉丁学院和波士顿拉丁学校、所有波士顿内城公立高中以及塔夫茨大学赖特科学教育创新中心成员之间的合作。它的目标是激发11年级和12年级学生的想象力，这些学生没有在课堂上看到他们真实世界经验的科学。它通过开发和传播一种新颖的以探究为基础的高中生物课程来实现这一目标，该课程侧重于在“五大”背景下的生物医学研究

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Engaging students in the biomedical sciences while they are still in high school is a critical first step toward educating a scientifically literate citizenry as well as initiating the pipeline that will eventually result in increased numbers of biomedical and health related professionals. This proposal is a collaboration between biomedical scientists at Tufts University School of Medicine, biology teachers at the Madison Park Technical and Vocational High School, the Boston Latin Academy and the Boston Latin School, all inner city Boston public high schools, and members of the Wright Center for Innovation in Science Education, also at Tufts. Its goal is to engage the imagination of 11th and 12th grade students who do not see the science of their real world experiences mirrored in the classroom. It accomplishes this goal by developing and disseminating a novel inquiry-based high school biology curriculum that focuses on biomedical research in the context of five 'great diseases' that challenge global health - infectious, neurological, cardiovascular, cancer and diabetes. A key element of the proposal is addressing the challenge of aligning content and process in the classroom to enable teachers to create the knowledge-centered classrooms that are critical for learning transfer. Accordingly the first aim is to first develop a learning community that will interactively guide the in-depth professional development underlying each of the 5 curricular modules. The learning community will then collaborate on the second aim; to develop curricular content and to generate deliverables for implementation of the curriculum in the classroom. This material, which will include a syllabus and web-based virtual and real interactive inquiry-base laboratory exercises, will be disseminated into the Boston Public School system and the broader educational community as part of the third aim. The fourth aim is to design and implement an evaluation strategy that will allow for ongoing revision during the project to ensure optimization of outcomes. The involvement of Tufts medical and biomedical graduate schools ensures that the program is highly sustainable and our final goal is to establish it as a model of how medical schools and school districts can interact to disseminate understanding of the biomedical research underlying disease at the high school level. PUBLIC HEALTH RELEVANCE (provided by applicant): Disappointingly, even after significant efforts at pedagogical reform, research continues to document adolescents steadily losing interest in science throughout high school. The economic impact of this disenchantment is significant and the life science/biomedical sector is growing slowly due to lack of a qualified work force, particularly in mid-level jobs. There is some cause for optimism: the same studies that demonstrate adolescent disenchantment with 'school' science show their interest in 'real world' science remaining stable over the same time frame. We postulate that students will only become engaged and able to visualize themselves as science professionals when they see the science of their real world experiences mirrored in the classroom. We address this hypothesis by generating an innovative curriculum designed to capture adolescent imaginations by focusing on the cutting edge research underlying 5 'great diseases' that impact global public health. We design the curriculum using a learning community consisting of practitioners of science and teachers of science whose goal is to collaborate to generate the content knowledge that will facilitate learning transfer in a knowledge-centered classroom.