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

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.

尽管学界在本科科学教育改革领域已开展大量工作，但学生在修完入门课程后，其科学认知类测评的表现往往反而更差，这表明亟需开发新型教育干预手段以扭转这一趋势。为满足这一需求，我们研发了《莫名之疾》（An Inexplicable Disease）——一款兼具吸引力与互动性的主动学习案例研究。该案例的独特之处在于，其旨在模拟科学探究流程：允许学生以自选实验模式，在大型课堂中迭代探究1957年的库鲁（Kuru）疫情。该案例着重凸显了科学研究中专业化分工与学术沟通的重要价值，且可广泛适配不同规模、涵盖生命科学各子领域的课程教学。