Medical schools, although the gatekeepers of much biomedical education and research, rarely engage formally with K-12 educators to influence curriculum content or professional development. This segregation of content experts from teachers creates a knowledge gap that limits inclusion of current biomedical science into high school curricula, impacting both public health literacy and the biomedical pipeline. The authors describe how, in 2009, scientists from Tufts Medical School and Boston public school teachers established a partnership of formal scholarly dialog to create 11th–12th grade high school curricula about critical health-related concepts, with the goal of increasing scientific literacy and influencing health-related decisions. The curricula are based on the great diseases (infectious diseases, neurological disorders, metabolic disease, and cancer). Unlike most health science curricular interventions that provide circumscribed activities, the curricula are comprehensive, each filling one full term of in-class learning and providing extensive real-time support for the teacher. In this article, the authors describe how they developed and implemented the infectious disease curriculum, and its impacts. The high school teachers and students showed robust gains in content knowledge and critical thinking skills, while the Tufts scientists increased their pedagogical knowledge and appreciation for health-related science communication. The results show how formal interactions between medical schools and K-12 educators can be mutually beneficial.

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This small-scale comparison case study evaluates the impact of an innovative approach to teacher professional development designed to promote implementation of a novel cutting edge high school neurological disorders curriculum. ‘Modeling for Fidelity’ (MFF) centers on an extended mentor relationship between teachers and biomedical scientists carried out in a virtual format in conjunction with extensive online educative materials. Four teachers from different diverse high schools in Massachusetts and Ohio who experienced MFF contextualized to a 6-week Neurological Disorders curriculum with the same science mentor were compared to a teacher who had experienced an intensive in-person professional development contextualized to the same curriculum with the same mentor. Fidelity of implementation was measured directly using an established metric and indirectly via student performance. The results show that teachers valued MFF, particularly the mentor relationship and were able to use it effectively to ensure critical components of the learning objectives were preserved. Moreover their students performed equivalently to those whose teacher had experienced intensive in-person professional development. Participants in all school settings demonstrated large (Cohen's d>2.0) and significant (p<0.0001 per-post) changes in conceptual knowledge as well as self-efficacy towards learning about neurological disorders (Cohen's d>1.5, p<0.0001 pre-post). The data demonstrates that the virtual mentorship format in conjunction with extensive online educative materials is an effective method of developing extended interactions between biomedical scientists and teachers that are scalable and not geographically constrained, facilitating teacher implementation of novel cutting-edge curricula.

The authors hypothesized that the decay of metarhodopsin to apo-opsin and free all-trans-retinaldehyde is faster with Pro347Ser-substituted rhodopsin than it is with wild-type rhodopsin. Consistent with this, the lipofuscin fluorophores A2PE, A2E, and A2PE-H(2), which form from retinaldehyde, were elevated in Pro347Ser transgenic mice.

Young scientists know that being competitive in the job market requires skills and experience beyond the bench. Given the overproduction of biomedical scientists with PhDs relative to the number of openings for secure academic positions, it is critical that young scientists acquire broad skill sets. Participating in curriculum design partnerships with teachers offers scientists a novel career opportunity. Our collaborative curriculum development team of biomedical scientists has partnered with teachers to build inquiry‐based biomedical curricula focused on “Great Diseases” that impact global health (Infectious Disease, Neurological Disorders, Metabolic Disease and Cancer), and now the scientists are also leading dissemination of the curricula in classrooms nationwide. Teachers often feel unprepared to lead students in formulating questions, designing experiments and interpreting data, a major obstacle to implementation of curricula with novel scientific content or authentic science practice. Interacting directly with scientists helps solve this problem. Scientists work with teachers via one‐on‐one virtual meetings, during which the biomedical scientist offers the teacher structured real‐time mentoring in content and helps devise strategies to implement the material in the classroom, at the same time augmenting their knowledge of effective teaching methods. We have found that when teachers participate in structured mentoring their ability to teach about cutting‐edge biomedical science improves, which is passed on to the high school students, the ultimate beneficiaries.Funded through: NIH Grant: R25OD010953‐04, gift from Boston Scientific and Cubist Pharmaceuticals Grant