This five-year partnership project among scientists and science educators at the University of Georgia, Augusta State University, science teachers in high schools, and the Biological Science Curriculum Study organization is a component of our long-term goal of enticing high school students to consider careers in science. The objectives of this project are to create and rigorously evaluate curricular materials that utilize high quality 3-D animations of physiological processes as a means for high school students to conduct inquiries into the life-threatening effects of diabetes. Diabetes is a disease of enormous human significance in the U.S., and veterinarians report that the prevalence of diabetes in our pets is increasing at an alarming rate. While diabetes has deleterious effects on a variety of body systems, it is the most common cause of kidney failure in people. The inquiry-based learning activities created in this project will cover 5 key biological processes: filtration, active transport, passive transport, blood pressure, and glucose homeostasis. These processes were selected for 5 reasons: (1) they are central to understanding cellular structure and function;(2) they are prominent in both state and nationals science learning standards;(3) they can be illustrated using a single nephron, the basic component of the kidney;(4) they are interrelated in ways that will allow students to develop robust understandings of these processes by exploring a series of inquiry questions;and, (5) diabetes substantially alters each of the processes. We will develop and evaluate the effectiveness of a set of inquiry-based curricular materials incorporating high quality 3-D animations of the 5 biological processes in a normal nephron and in a nephron from an individual with diabetes. The inquiries will direct the students to look for, describe, and quantify details and changes that characterize the effects of diabetes on the 5 selected biological processes. As the students progress through the inquiries, they will generate data that will be used to compare the effectiveness of these curricular materials with traditional methods of teaching the same subject matter. The curricular materials will be evaluated to assess their impact on student achievement and student interest in science as a possible career. A unique component of this project will be on-site visits of the students to the Colleges of Veterinary Medicine and Pharmacy, during which they will learn how veterinarians and physicians evaluate kidney function, how research on animals is translated to human medicine, and how clinical trials are performed in veterinary and human medicine to evaluate the effectiveness of new treatments. The purpose of this project is to create curricular materials that utilize high quality 3-D models and animations of anatomical and physiological processes as a means for high school students to conduct inquiries into the life-threatening effects of diabetes. The inquiries will direct the students to collect and analyze data from the 3-D models and animations showing the effects of diabetes on filtration, active transport, passive transport, blood pressure and glucose homeostasis in a nephron. The Biological Sciences Curriculum Study organization will oversee national distribution of the curricular materials at the end of the project.
