Detectives in the Classroom
The basis of Detectives: Five Essential Questions and Enduring Understandings
Detectives in the Classroom is based on pedagogical principles suggested in Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe's text, Understanding by Design.
Wiggins and McTighe advocate that curricula can be built by identifying enduring understandings and essential questions. An enduring understanding is a big idea that resides at the heart of a discipline and has lasting value outside the classroom. An essential question is a question that can be answered when the enduring understanding is achieved.
The Detectives in the Classroom lessons develop students' abilities to answer five essential questions and develop the five enduring understandings described below.
| Essential Questions | Enduring Understandings | |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | How is this health outcome distributed and what hypotheses might explain that distribution? | Health-related conditions and behaviors are not distributed uniformly in a population. Each has a unique descriptive epidemiology that can be discovered by identifying how it is distributed in a population in terms of person, place, and time. Descriptive epidemiology provides clues for formulating hypotheses. |
| 2 | Is there an association between the hypothesized cause and the health outcome? | Causal hypotheses can be tested by observing exposures and health states and outcomes of people as they go about their daily lives. Information from these observational studies can be used to make and compare rates and identify associations. |
| 3 | Is this association causal? | Causation is only one explanation for finding an association between an exposure and an outcome. Because observational studies are complicated by factors not controlled by the observer, other explanations must also be considered. |
| 4 | What should be done when preventable causes of adverse health outcomes are found? | When a causal association has been identified, decisions about possible prevention strategies are based on more than the scientific evidence. Given competing values, social, economic, and political factors must also be considered. |
| 5 | Did the prevention strategy work? | The effectiveness of a prevention strategy can be evaluated by making and comparing rates of the outcome in populations of people who were and were not exposed to the strategy. Costs, trade-offs and alternative strategies must also be considered. |
The specific goals of the curriculum are to:
- Define the discipline of epidemiology and the work of epidemiologists
- Explain the basic concepts and understandings of epidemiology
- Actively engage students in scientific exploration and problem-solving
- Help students uncover how epidemiology can be applied to identify, control, and prevent public health problems
- Increase students’ interest and abilities to “think epidemiologically” and solve problems using scientific methods
A successful learning experience should empower students to make more informed personal health decisions, and to become more scientifically literate participants in the democratic decision-making process concerning public health policy. (See “8 Reasons to Teach/Learn Epidemiology)