From the Curriculum Design Team
Mark Kaelin, Ed.D. and Wendy Huebner, Ph.D.

A Little History
We had been teaching graduate courses in epidemiology at Montclair State University, Seton Hall University, and Felician College for more than a dozen years, when we read a March 1997 EpiMonitor column titled "CDC Launches Effort to Teach Epidemiology from Kindergarten to High School." Based on our experiences teaching epidemiological concepts at a Saturday program for gifted and talented middle school students, as well as our teenage children's interest in dinner table conversations, we agreed with CDC's conclusion that the science of epidemiology could capture younger students' attention. A sidebar of the EpiMonitor article told us that for further information, we could contact Donna Stroup or Rick Goodman at the Epidemiology Program Office. We did so, and began to think about how we might contribute to this effort.

Donna and Rick invited us to present our still-hazy ideas for an epidemiology curriculum to high school biology teachers at the 1998 Woodrow Wilson Biology Institute, at Princeton University. At the conclusion of our presentation, we asked the teachers to identify barriers to teaching epidemiology and ways those barriers could be addressed. The most frequently mentioned barriers were the lack of appealing instructional materials, the need for teacher training in epidemiology, and a lack of class time. Participants suggested incorporating epidemiological principles into flexible and interdisciplinary materials that could be implemented throughout the school year.

Taking this encouragement and advice, we began to develop what we now call Detectives in the Classroom: An Epidemiology Curriculum for Science, Mathematics, and Health Educators. This project was supported by two Science Education Partnership Awards (SEPA) from the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Our work has also been sustained by support of colleagues and the partnerships we have established along the way.

[Since then we have developed two additional curricula in epidemiology with support from NIH. These include a grant from the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) to develop “Exploring Drug Abuse through the Science of Epidemiology,” and a SEPA grant to develop “Epidemiology and the Energy Balance Equation:]

Biographical Information:
Mark is a Professor in the College of Health and Nutrition Sciences, at Montclair State University (MSU) in Montclair, NJ, where he has developed and taught graduate and undergraduate epidemiology courses over the past 20 years. In addition to his work as Principal Investigator in developing curricula for middle and high school students, (above) he was a member of the RWJF/College Board’s Young Epidemiology Scholars Teaching Units Working Group that wrote 24 Teaching Units for the Epidemiology Instructional Library for the High School Classroom. He was then invited by RWJF to conduct Teach Epidemiology professional development workshops to prepare middle and high school teachers to teach epidemiology, collaborating with Dr. Diane Marie St. George. (To date there have been 18 workshops reaching more than 250 teachers.)

Wendy was a practicing epidemiologist in private industry for 20 years, where she was the lead epidemiologist for company surveillance systems in the U.S. and globally. She was the principal investigator in numerous published studies of employee health, and also co-developed and administered a three-level ethical review process according to federal human subjects’ guidelines. She has been the Collaborator in the epidemiology education research at MSU (above), regarding curriculum development, professional development, and pilot- and field-testing. She lead a NIH-supported project to design and test an instrument to measure scientific literacy, and co-founded / co-chaired the Education Committee for the Epidemiology Section of the American Public Health Association.

Mark and Wendy collaborated with Dr. Ralph Cordell to co-found the Epidemiology Education Movement. Started in 2005, this grassroots effort aims to: 1) infuse epidemiology education into curricula in grades 6-12; 2) improve the scientific literacy of students; and 3) and increase the number of students preparing for careers in public health. Also, from 2010-2013 they collaborated with Dr. Marian Passannante at UMDNJ and Rutgers in creating, implementing, evaluating, and refining a Think Like an Epidemiologist Challenge event for annual NJ Science Olympiad high school competitions. During this “Epi Challenge,” student teams experience a months-long, authentic, “inch wide and mile deep” immersion into the practices needed to engage in scientific inquiry. Most recently, Mark and Wendy have consulted on a NIH (NIGMS) grant at Penn State Hershey (Dr. Robin Taylor Wilson) to investigate the impact of the Epi Challenge on high school sophomores, testing outcomes of scientific literacy, interest in science, and choice of college major during the senior year.