Yale Center for Teaching and Learning

An Introduction to Aflatoxins and their Epidemiology

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