What's Happening to My Body When I'm Sick?

Project Directors: Melvin Feng, Jessica Hawkins, Jennifer Park, George Joseph

Project Title: Introduction to Microbiology and Immunology

Total Budget Figure: $2,487.45

Proposal Summary

In today's biology classrooms students are exposed to microbiology as well immunology concepts. Unfortunately these topics are not presented in a way in which the students realize how important and applicable microbiology and immunology are to everyday life. By implementing a project based unit that covers these two concepts, students will be provided with carefully planned instruction over the subjects' main ideas in addition to hands on experience with a variety of microbiological tools used by practicing scientists within the field. Students will then be asked to use their knowledge of the material and their newly acquired laboratory skills to complete a number of laboratory activities throughout the unit.

The activities that students will be working on are inquiry based rather than the traditional approach in which students simply follow the provided procedures and do not really gain any substantial insight into the material. Having the ability to apply their knowledge will help students see the material from a different angle rather than from the one provided by the textbook. This new perspective on the material is readily apparent in the final assessment for this unit in which the students will be split up into teams and assigned a fictitious patient that is afflicted with an actual disease. Students will have to use critical thinking skills and knowledge they gained from the unit in order to research and discover the correct diagnosis of their patient's mystery disease. Upon completing the unit students will have gained an appreciation for microbiology and immunology that could not have been achieved simply by listening to lectures and reading the textbook.

Description

High school students often have difficulty being engaged and seeing the importance and real-life application of what they learn with the topics covered in the microbiology and immunology units. To address these issues, we will use a combination of lab experiments, simulations, direct instruction, and student-directed research projects. This unit incorporates various lab experiments so that students can gain hands-on experience and familiarize themselves with the laboratory equipment and techniques that scientists often utilize in their work. The students will learn how to use and take care of microscopes, identify unknown microorganisms, perform gram stains and blood typing, and observe the effects of antibiotics on bacteria during their lab times. Direct instruction and simulations, such as the activity that demonstrates the effects of a virus on a population, are interspersed throughout the unit to provide students with in-depth background information over the topics of bacteria, viruses, and immune system. 

All of these experiments and lectures lead to preparing the students to perform their own case study research. Students become microbiologists and immunologists as they work in groups of three or four to identify an unknown disease that is affecting their assigned patient. The various lab techniques and lessons covered in the previous weeks, as well as resources from the library and internet, will provide the students with the necessary knowledge to figure out the identity of the different diseases assigned to them. In the last two days of the unit, each group will present their findings to the class in a manner similar to how scientists today present their research work (e.g. poster sessions). 

Additionally, a large portion of the grades for this unit will be based on the final project and their work on the lab experiments. This is because we find traditional tests and quizzes to be ineffective ways to evaluate students' understanding and mastery of what they learned. Tests usually only require students to memorize and recall information they received in class but having them work on this final project will allow them to apply the concepts they have been taught. The innovative methods of teaching this unit will expose students to the exciting world of microbiology and immunology and help them to see the significance and connections between all that they are learning and how it applies to the real world.

Rationale

One only has to watch the evening news to hear about emerging health issues such as antibiotic resistant bacteria and bird flu. The often times dramatic coverage of these problems from numerous perspectives can make it difficult for the general public to understand the consequences of these events. Any efforts toward easing the confusion surrounding these issues should start with increased awareness through education. Although today's high school students learn the basics of microbiology they are not able to apply their knowledge to real world situations. The students know the context of the subject in the textbook sense, but they are not being equipped with the tools or instruction to realize the practical applications microbiology can provide.

Our proposal for teaching a high school microbiology unit covers the essential topics of bacteria, viruses and the human immune system. This provides students with the basic knowledge they need to successfully carry out the inquiry based laboratory activities that accompany each of these main topics. These activities are on par with what the students might experience in an undergraduate microbiology lab course. By thoughtfully integrating the material with the labs, students will be able to translate their conceptual knowledge into meaningful skills in microscopy, bacterial identification, and blood typing. Learning these techniques at the high school level will hopefully instill a desire to study microbiology in college or to undertake a future career in this field. Making the material more worthwhile for the students is one step towards helping the general public sift through and make sense of the sometimes confusing issues surrounding the subject of microbiology.

Potential Impact

Through the use of actual lab techniques, this unit will allow the students insight in to what real science is, as opposed to cookie-cutter labs where students just run through the motions. Students will learn about sterile technique, its importance, and how non-sterile technique can influence the results of an experiment. The use of gram staining, using microscopes, and other lab equipment will give the students a deeper understanding of what goes on in a microbiological lab environment, and what is necessary to identify a pathogen and isolate it.

This unit hopes to provide students with the groundwork necessary to do microbiological scientific study. The unit progresses through overviews of the human immune system, to the ways a body can be infected, the possible symptoms, and as said above, to the lab techniques. By the end of the unit, the students should be able to identify pathways for certain bacterial and viral infections, specifically how they interact with the human body. This will be the anatomy and physiology aspect to immunology. In this manner, the unit hopes to interrelate the study of immunology with microbiology by showing the connections between the immune system and microbiology. These connections are what will allow the student to draw conclusions for their final project, in which they will be given a scenario of a person infected with a particular disease, and they will need to figure out what the disease is through the use of both the symptoms related to immunology, as well as the microbiological aspect of culturing and other lab work.

Evaluation Plan

To evaluate how successful this project is, we will be using various methods of assessments to determine how well the students are mastering the concepts in the unit. To see if students understand the importance and how to practice sterile techniques in the lab, we will test how well they can isolate different bacterial colonies from others through the use of plating. Then we will have them draw, label, identify, and give the dimensions of several microbes seen through the microscopes at several magnifications, which would allow us to assess their proficiency level with the microscopes. To evaluate how well the students understand the interactions between the body and bacterial/viral infections, we will give them a scenario of a pathogen entering the body and ask them to diagram and describe the immunological pathway involved with dealing with this situation. To expand on this subject, we might also include a deficiency in the body and have the students explain how that would impact the immune system. Students will also be tested on how well they can perform a gram stain and interpret its results to decipher the identity of the bacteria.  Towards the end of the unit the students will work on a case study research of a person infected with an unknown disease. This assessment will be the most useful in measuring the project's success since the students will be utilizing everything that they have learned throughout the unit.  We will be able to observe how well the students are able to make the connections between immunology and microbiology and also skillfully employ appropriate lab techniques in order to complete their final assignment. 

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