Introduction to the Special Issue on Immunology

For many science teachers and science teacher educators, COVID-19 made clear a need to focus on the socioscientific issues. [...]it subverts and undercuts the goals of having inquiry in the standards as it was intended. [...]the lack of ability to address things outside the standards leads to a lesser engagement with inquiry as it becomes more a poorly implemented default than a carefully crafted learning objective. [...]it is one with no explicit link to the NGSS. [...]teachers have made a choice either to teach about IDE outside the content mandated by the NGSS-perhaps under the cover of inquiry-or to avoid instruction on the most relevant and immediate socioscientific issue in students' lives. [...]current events have prompted a resurgence of this discussion (Zucker and Noyce 2020). [...]examination and discussion of how the NGSS might be understood or implemented in more adaptive ways is both timely and productive for scholars and policy makers who have a vested interest in the sufficiency or potential shortcomings of the dominant set of science education standards.

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.