Read NSTA's award-winning, peer-reviewed practitioner journal for secondary level and high school science teachers.
The COVID-19 pandemic laid bare the absence of resources for teachers to engage students in learning about infectious disease as both a socio-scientific issue and a scientific phenomenon. With infectious disease largely absent from the NGSS, teachers had to creatively link lessons that contextualize and examine key aspects of infectious disease education. We saw in real time the impacts of popular news, social media, and public mood on broader socioscientific behaviors such as vaccination, masking, and social distancing. This special issue features 10 articles that share current teaching strategies and tools for teaching about epidemics and viruses, all framed within the Straif-Bourgeois, Ratard, and Kretzschmar framework for infectious disease, which delineates three dimensions of epidemiology.
Journal Article
Introduction to the Special Issue on Immunology
By Colby Tofel-Grehl and Brooke A. Whitworth
Journal Article
By Matthew Johnson, Tiffany Lewis, Kit Martin, Amber Cesare, Anthony Schmitt, Eugene Lengerich, Kristin Bittner, and Chris Divyak
Journal Article
By Lindsey Mohan, Wayne Wright, Katie Van Horne, Joy Barnes-Johnson, Holly Hereau, Arash Jamshidi, Rebecca G. Kaplan, Audrey Mohan, Dawn Novak, Michael Novak, Allysa Orwig, Ty Scaletta, Nicole Vick, and Daniel C. Voss
Journal Article
By Delaney Worthington, Andrew Warnock, Mike Viney, Victoria Jordan, Jennifer Mclean, Karina Hassell, Lynne Judish, and Courtney Butler
Journal Article
Immersive Learning Through Experiential Inquiry of a Virtual Epidemic
By Tyler Hansen, Deborah Fields, Amanda Strawhacker, and Yasmin Kafaiy
Journal Article
Using Multiple Models to Learn about COVID-19
By Jamie Elsner, Troy Sadler, Eric Kirk, Rebecca Rawson, Patricia Friedrichsen, and Li Ke
Online Connections (supplementary materials) for issues from 2020 and earlier can be found here.