yEvo: a high school lab for teaching evolution and genomics
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Project Description
Narrative This project will develop and evaluate educational resources about evolution using a hands on high school teaching lab. The project will also generate data on mechanisms of antifungal resistance, which is an important public health concern.
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Abstract
Abstract Evolution is a core concept in understanding nearly all of the life sciences. Better public understanding of evolution can also better contextualize and even prevent modern public health crises such as the emergence of antifungal and antibiotic resistance, and evolution of new viral pathogens, as just a few examples. Despite the importance of evolution, it can be difficult to teach well in secondary education. Many treatments focus on historical evolution and fail to convey that evolution is an active, ongoing process. These strategies also don’t make it clear that the study of evolution is itself an innovative, multidisciplinary field, which encompasses not just powerful comparisons of historical fossils and inferences from modern day extant organisms and genomes, but also experimental investigations, where hypotheses can be tested and evolution can be observed in action in the lab and in the environment. We propose to develop yEvo, a teaching lab where students in high school classes use experimental evolution and whole genome sequencing to study how bakers yeast can become resistant to a low dose of an over-the-counter antifungal. The yEvo project is a close collaboration with university researchers, involving students in an authentic research project designed to generate publishable data. In the new project, we will build on a successful pilot implementation to 1. professionalize our curriculum materials, 2. build tools that will allow high school students to analyze and visualize their own sequencing data, and share it among classrooms, 3. scale to more schools and scientists using a novel “franchising” model, and 4. build standalone kits that capture the essence of the yEvo experience with lower resource and personnel requirements, allowing us to reach even more schools. We will accompany these new projects with evaluations that allow us to improve the teaching materials as we go, and also test them to ensure they are improving student understanding of evolution, scientific research, and their own potential to pursue STEM careers.
