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The pandemic outbreak of COVID-19 has highlighted an urgent need for infectious disease education for K-12 students. To gather a better understanding of what educational interventions have been conducted and to what effect, we performed a scoping review. We identified and examined 23 empirical researcher- and teacher-designed studies conducted in the last 20 years that have reported on efforts to help K-12 students learn about infectious diseases, with a focus on respiratory transmission. Our review shows studies of educational interventions on this topic are rare, especially with regard to the more population-scale (vs. cellular level) concepts of epidemiology. Furthermore, efforts to educate youth about infectious disease primarily focused on secondary school students, with an emphasis on interactive learning environments to model or simulate both cellular-level and population-level attributes of infectious disease. Studies were only mildly successful in raising science interest, with somewhat stronger findings on helping students engage in scientific inquiry on the biology of infectious diseases and/or community spread. Most importantly, efforts left out critical dimensions of transmission dynamics key to understanding implications for public health. Based on our review, we articulate implications for further research and development in this important domain.
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Entomologists in the K-12 Classroom: A Scoping Review
Engaging the public is a common practice in science disciplines and is deeply rooted in the discipline of entomology. These efforts to engage specific target groups within the general public are well studied, especially extension efforts to engage farmers and agricultural stakeholders, but this is not the case for K-12 educational spaces. Here, we conducted a scoping review to (1) determine the characteristics of entomology outreach efforts engaging K-12 populations and (2) identify opportunities for improvement based on the synthesis of those characteristics. We systematically searched five databases to identify 42 publications relevant to the parameters of this project. Analysis of characteristics indicated that entomology outreach efforts in K-12 classrooms tend to be reflective, are more often published in educationally focused journals, and rarely evaluate the interventions employed. Opportunities for improvement were identified from these trends, and from them we suggest that the practice of K-12 outreach benefits from (i) publishing in entomology-focused journals, (ii) including non-academic authors, (iii) evaluating interventions, (iv) including student data, and (v) considering axes of diversity and inclusion.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2100990
- PAR ID:
- 10594507
- Publisher / Repository:
- Insects
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Insects
- Volume:
- 15
- Issue:
- 10
- ISSN:
- 2075-4450
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 742
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.3390/insects15100742
