The Great Diseases Project: A Partnership between Tufts Medical School and the Boston Public Schools

As biomedical researchers, we are acutely aware of the serious consequences that follow from the failure to adequately educate citizens about medicine and health. For example, the doubling in the U.S. of annual deaths from infectious disease since their historic low in 1980 appears due as much to changes in human behavior as to evolution of pathogens,1–3 suggesting that disease prevention depends on an educated, scientifically literate citizenry. Convinced that this education must begin before adulthood,4 we believe that high school students must be exposed to up-to-date, scientifically rigorous, life-relevant information about infectious disease. Unfortunately, in this era of “teaching to the test,” many high schools have sacrificed time they used to spend teaching science and health, focusing instead on “core” subjects such as mathematics and English.5 The available teaching materials do little to counter the imbalance; BSCS Biology: A Human Approach, a first-level biology text used nationwide by many school districts, including Boston’s, covers both the immune system and infectious diseases in only 25 of its 648 pages.6 These shifting priorities and lack of good, up-to-date materials means that little current biomedical information about infectious disease is disseminated in the high school classroom. As a result, many students (and their teachers) harbor misconceptions that impact the decisions they make about their own health.7–10 It is hard not to be pessimistic about how U.S. students will learn to make educated decisions about their personal health, let alone how they will be able to replenish the scientific workforce that researches and develops new strategies against microbial resistance and emerging pathogens. The poor performance of U.S. high school students against international benchmarks raises concerns about their science education in general.11–13 One particular challenge that undoubtedly impacts their performance is their low level of engagement in science.14–19 Students engage when taught content they value, yet classroom learning rarely mirrors the science of real world experience.19 When it does, students’ motivation and achievement increase,20–22 suggesting that high school curricula based on topics students find inherently interesting, such as their own physiology and health, can improve both engagement and academic performance.* High school curricula focused on life-relevant topics like infectious disease, therefore, fulfill two critical needs by improving informed decision-making and by fostering interest and engagement in science. The potential benefits, however, are limited by a lack of both teachers who know the science and scientists who can effectively communicate with teachers. Medical schools shoulder significant responsibility for this knowledge gap. They rarely provide incentives for their content experts to interact with the K–12 community. They also suffer consequences of this segregation because they are not exposed to the wide range of pedagogical strategies available to educate students with diverse learning styles.23