Cannibalism, Kuru, and mad cows: Prion disease as a 'choose-your-own-experiment’ case study to simulate scientific inquiry in large lectures
Serrano, A.; Liebner, Jeffrey; Hines, Justin K.
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.
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