Students learn about aflatoxins and their relevance to health by analyzing the interaction among pathogen, host, and the environment (the disease triangle).
Topic: Fungi and aflatoxins
Developer: Dan Larkin
Primary Learning Goals
- Students gain insight into the scientific process by trying to solve an epidemiological mystery and learning about Turkey “X” disease
- Students learn about aflatoxins and their relevance to health
- Students gain perspective that disease results from organisms’ interactions with each other and their environment through lessons on the disease triangle
Secondary Learning Goals
- Students’ knowledge of microbes will be expanded
- Students will view science as investigative
Diversity
- Students are exposed to diverse learning methods: traditional lecture; short video clip; individual work, paired work, and whole class discussion
- Students see how different branches of science can cooperate to solve complex problems (agronomy, ecology, medicine, etc.)
- Students learn about case studies from U.S., U.K., India, and Kenya
Scientific Teaching Themes
- Uses active learning approaches, incorporates diversity, and builds-in pre, post, and in-class assessment
- Requires students to “act like” scientists by generating hypotheses and thinking about how to test them, and provides examples of science-in-action
Active Learning
- Think-pair-share activity
- Whole class discussion eliciting factors contributing to disease outbreak
- Concept map of complex interactions involved in Diamond dog poisoning
- Take-home individual work extending knowledge to new situations
Assessment
- Pre-quiz will help instructors evaluate prior knowledge
- Think-pair-share exercise will gauge student understanding of scientific method (hypothesis testing, experimental design, controls…)
- Whole class discussion will demonstrate understanding of factors that contribute to disease and basic epidemiology
- Diamond case concept map demonstrates student understanding of interactions