Cannibalism, Kuru, and Mad Cows: Prion Disease As a "Choose-Your-Own-Experiment" Case Study to Simulate Scientific Inquiry in Large Lectures.

• Main Authors: Antonio Serrano, Jeffrey Liebner, Justin K Hines
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Public Library of Science (PLoS) 2016-01-01
• Series: PLoS Biology
• Online Access: http://europepmc.org/articles/PMC4720379?pdf=render

Despite significant efforts to reform undergraduate science education, students often perform worse on assessments of perceptions of science after introductory courses, demonstrating a need for new educational interventions to reverse this trend. To address this need, we created An Inexplicable Disease, an engaging, active-learning case study that is unusual because it aims to simulate scientific inquiry by allowing students to iteratively investigate the Kuru epidemic of 1957 in a choose-your-own-experiment format in large lectures. The case emphasizes the importance of specialization and communication in science and is broadly applicable to courses of any size and sub-discipline of the life sciences.