"The evil virus cell": Students' knowledge and beliefs about viruses

Teaching and learning about respiratory infectious diseases: A scoping review of interventions in K-12 education

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.

Teaching Two-Eyed Seeing in Education for Sustainable Development: Inspirations from the Science|Environment|Health Pedagogy in Pandemic Times

This conceptual paper starts by outlining six important concerns of Science|Environment|Health (S|E|H), a new pedagogy of science that has been developed during the last decade by a Special Interest Group of the ESERA community. The paper points out that the importance of these six concerns even increased during the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic. They play an essential role in preparing future citizens not only for coping with the pandemic but in general with other great challenges that lie ahead of our world. In this way S|E|H is naturally connected to the UN Sustainable Development Goals, and the paper discusses how S|E|H work in recent years may inspire education for sustainable development. The six concerns are: (1) the question of curricular change, (2) the role of knowledge in S|E|H contexts, (3) the danger of scientism and the tension between individual and political responsibility, (4) decision-making in S|E|H contexts, (5) the challenge of coping with uncertainty, and (6) the question of scientific holism. Structured by these concerns, the paper reviews recent research of the S|E|H community. These findings are reframed by the Two-Eyed Seeing approach that has recently found growing interest in the S|E|H community. This new approach distinguishes between the scientific image and the life-world image on an ontological basis, which helps to disentangle the six concerns and to provide a framework for tackling them in teacher education and educational research—in S|E|H contexts and also in education for sustainable development.

Tipping the Fencesitters—The Impact of a Minimal Intervention Enhanced with Biological Facts on Swiss Student Teachers’ Perception of HPV Vaccination Safety

Not much is known about the role of scientific knowledge in vaccination decision making. This study is based on previous findings that the concern about the human papillomavirus (HPV) agent mutating back to a virulent HPV was common among Swiss student teachers and turned out to be one factor of vaccine hesitancy. The study investigate the impact of a standard public health brochure describing the effectiveness, safety, and importance of HPV vaccination on young student teachers, and the additional effect of supplementing the standard brochure with biological arguments against the mutation concerns. It uses a pre-posttest design and assigns participants randomly to two groups, one reviewing a standard public health brochure, the other the same brochure enhanced with additional biological information. Participants in both groups showed a significant positive change in their beliefs about vaccination safety, effectiveness, and importance in preventing cervical cancer. Post hoc analysis showed significant safety beliefs gain for the subgroup of participants who received the biology-enhanced text and held moderate, rather than high or low, pretest safety beliefs—the so-called fencesitters. We conclude that these fencesitters may particularly profit from even minimal (biologically supplemented) interventions, an effect that should receive more attention in future research.

Children's conceptions of coronavirus

The present study aimed to examine children's conceptions of coronavirus as denoted in their verbal descriptions and drawings and whether these vary as a function of children's age and the mode of expression. Data were collected in Greece during spring 2020 and 344 children aged 4 to 10 years were first asked to verbally describe coronavirus and then to produce a drawing of it. Content analysis of data revealed the following main themes: (a) Coronavirus, (b) Medical, (c) Psychological, and (d) Social. Results showed that children from an early age present a remarkable level of understanding of coronavirus and the COVID-19 disease as a multidimensional construct, which can be designated not only through characteristics of the Sars-Cov-2 but also through its medical, social, and psychological consequences on people's lives. Moreover, children were found to emphasize different aspects of this construct depending on their age and the mode of expression.

Assessing adolescents' critical health literacy: How is trust in government leadership associated with knowledge of COVID-19?

This study explored relations between COVID-19 news source, trust in COVID-19 information source, and COVID-19 health literacy in 194 STEM-oriented adolescents and young adults from the US and the UK. Analyses suggest that adolescents use both traditional news (e.g., TV or newspapers) and social media news to acquire information about COVID-19 and have average levels of COVID-19 health literacy. Hierarchical linear regression analyses suggest that the association between traditional news media and COVID-19 health literacy depends on participants’ level of trust in their government leader. For youth in both the US and the UK who used traditional media for information about COVID-19 and who have higher trust in their respective government leader (i.e., former US President Donald Trump and UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson) had lower COVID-19 health literacy. Results highlight how youth are learning about the pandemic and the importance of not only considering their information source, but also their levels of trust in their government leaders.

Virology in the Classroom: Current Approaches and Challenges to Undergraduate- and Graduate-Level Virology Education

The pervasive effects of the current coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic are but one reason for educators to refocus their efforts on virology teaching. Additionally, it is critical to understand how viruses function and to elucidate the relationship between virus and host. An understanding of current virology education may improve pedagogical approaches for educating our students and trainees. Faculty who teach undergraduate microbiology indicate that approximately 10% of the course content features viruses; stand-alone virology courses are infrequently offered to undergraduates. Fortunately, virology taught to undergraduates includes foundational material; several approaches for delivery of lecture- and lab-based content exist. At the graduate education level, there is growing appreciation that an emphasis on logic, reasoning, inference, and statistics must be reintroduced into the curriculum to create a generation of scientists who have a greater capacity for creativity and innovation. Educators also need to remove barriers to student success, at all levels of education. Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Virology, Volume 8 is September 2021. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates.