NIEHS Teaches by Example.

   There was a child went forth every day
   And the first object he look'd upon, that
   object he became,
   And that object became part of him for the day
   or a certain part of the day,
   Or for many years or stretching cycles of years.

--Walt Whitman

It's never too early to introduce a child to the wonder of science, especially when that introduction involves plenty of muddy, gooey, thought-provoking, fascinating hands-on experiences. That's the philosophy behind the NIEHS's array of programs aimed at making environmental health science not only fun but meaningful for students in kindergarten through twelfth grade (K-12).

The programs are part of the NIEHS's efforts to convey findings in basic, clinical, and epidemiological research to the public in understandable terms, says Allen Dearry, chief of the Chemical Exposures and Molecular Biology Branch and a key player in getting the K-12 programs off the ground. "As members of the public," he says, "we're challenged to be involved in health-related decision making, but we don't always have a good understanding of what that involves. K-12 was developed as one mechanism to address that gap." The NIEHS commitment to improving science education at both local and national levels is important, says Fred Tyson, program administrator for extramural K-12 projects, because if students are interested in and knowledgeable about environmental health science, they'll be better-educated consumers and possibly more health-conscious adults. "And," he says, "we might turn some kids on to pursue a career in environmental health science."

A Nationwide Lesson

The institute's Division of Extramural Research and Training is midway through a three-phase grant process to develop instructional materials, educate science teachers, and track the results of exposing kids to environmental health science in school. Phase one, begun in 1993, involved developing instructional tools that could be incorporated into existing curricula. For younger children, some materials took the form of books featuring cartoon characters teaching about the relationship between people and the environment. For instance, My Health My World, a project by researchers at the Baylor College of Medicine, comprises three storybooks for children in kindergarten through fourth grade: Mr. Slaptail's Secret, which features a beaver who lives in a dusty, allergen-rich home, Mystery of the Muddled Marsh, in which the residents of Beaver Pond fight fertilizer runoff, and Mr. Slaptail's Curious Contraption, in which the inventive title character builds a solar water heater. Older students are targeted with CD-ROM and Web-based programs such as Project Greenskate, developed by researchers at the University of Washington Department of Environmental Health, in which students must gather key documents from Web sites for the fictitious Lakeview city government to help them determine whether it is safe to build a skating park on a former industrial site. The students not only learn how to obtain facts and information but are also introduced to such basic toxicology concepts as dose--response relationships, routes of exposure, thresholds for toxic effects, bio-transformation, and risk assessment.

Phase two began in 1996 with the funding of seven grants to provide teachers with the skills and support necessary to implement an environmental health science curriculum. The grantees used strategies such as summer workshops, hands-on lab and field experience, and networks of science teachers and science dubs to further science teachers' knowledge and skills. For instance, the Environmental and Occupational Health Sciences Institute at Rutgers University in New Jersey and the Southwest Environmental Health Sciences Center at the University of Arizona teamed up to create the ToxRAP network, a train-the-trainer project in which teachers who were taught a special toxicology/risk assessment curriculum go on to train other teachers within their school district or region. Originally intended only for New Jersey teachers, the network has since gone nationwide, reaching 27 school districts in 11 states.

With phase three, eight new seven-year grants will be awarded this summer for projects to investigate whether the use of environmental health science an an integrative context for learning can actually enhance student achievement in nonscientific areas such as language arts and social studies. "These projects are really different," says Tyson. "What they will do is use an environmental health science issue such as asthma or lead poisoning as a focus for doing multidisciplinary teaching." At least three courses will revolve around the chosen topic, allowing students to develop diverse skills while being introduced to different facets of the topic. So, for instance, in one course they may perform a statistical analysis of lead poisoning, while in a second course they may learn what makes lead toxic to humans, and in a third they may write a term paper about the public health importance of lead poisoning. The effectiveness of such multidisciplinary teaching will be gauged by comparing students who do and don't take the courses in terms of standard criteria such as in-school grades and standardized test scores, as well as measuring the students' performance before and after implementation of the projects.

Each project will be a cooperative effort between environmental health scientists, teachers, and individual state departments of education, which will be called in to ensure that state educational standards are being adhered to with the innovative programs. If all goes as planned, state education departments could conceivably adopt such programs for whole school systems. Tyson adds that these programs are not geared toward specialty groups such as gifted or disadvantaged students. "We're looking for programs that can be put into any classroom," he says.

Meanwhile, each of the Environmental Health Sciences Centers, Marine and Freshwater Biomedical Sciences Centers, and Developmental Centers supported by the NIEHS sponsors a Community Outreach and Education Program (COEP) that addresses the educational needs of students, teachers, and other members of the surrounding community. Many COEPs specifically target school-age children with activities ranging from bringing students into the center to show them how research is conducted to preparing educational presentations to take to the schools. In Boston, Massachusetts, for example, staff from the Kresge Center for Environmental Health at the Harvard School of Public Health go into local schools to teach K-12 students about environmental health issues pertinent to the students' lives. "We try to teach them about their bodies and the environment and how the two are interrelated," says Marshall Katler, a research specialist and director of the center's Environmental Health Education Program. Students experience hands-on learning, handling real bones and lungs to learn about how they grow, collecting and measuring pollutants in their school, and using lead detection kits to test the paint in their homes.

The NIEHS is also teaming up with other science, government, and educational organizations to coordinate education and dissemination efforts. For instance, for the past five years the institute has cosponsored a one-day seminar during the annual Society of Toxicology conference for area teachers to learn basic concepts of toxicology, receive some training in teaching toxicology, and then attend some of the scientific sessions at the conference. The teachers are later matched up with scientist mentors who advise them on bringing environmental health science into their classrooms. The NIEHS is also involved in a two-year project to develop standardized educational materials addressing all the areas represented by the National Institutes of Health (NIH). In collaboration with the NIH Office of Science Education, each member institute is developing a curriculum packet reflecting its field of expertise targeted at the grade level it chooses. The NIEHS is now field-testing an environmental health science packet in print and CD-ROM formats aimed at middle school students.

Science in My Own Backyard

In a program closer to home, participants in the Summers of Discovery program, including high school through graduate-level students, high school science teachers, and science faculty, are placed in research internships in an NIEHS lab for 2-3 months during the summer, where they receive one-on-one mentoring with an institute scientist. They also attend weekly seminars, where they discuss current research being conducted at the institute with the scientists in charge, and participate in a summer's-end poster session of their own work at the institute. Mike Hogan, associate director for planning and policy for the institute's Division of Intramural Research and coordinator of the Summers of Discovery program, says, "I promise [the participants] four things when they start: that I'll work 'em to death, that they'll work with people who love going to their jobs in the morning, that I'll put them two years ahead of the rest of their class in technology skills, and that they'll know at the end of the summer whether this is something they'll want to do with the rest of their lives."

Although participants receive as much mentoring as they need, they are pushed to work as independently as possible, becoming full-fledged productive members of the research team. "I feel it's our responsibility as scientists and members of the federal government to make science available and interesting to as many kids as possible," says Hogan.

Each summer, about 100 participants are accepted to the program, which is open to any student, although participation by women and minorities is encouraged since these groups are traditionally underrepresented in the sciences. The program reaches students at a point when they are beginning to make career choices, offering them a taste of life as a scientist, and benefits teachers by giving them training in the latest environmental health science technology that they can take back to their classrooms. Hogan points out, "It makes the classroom much more meaningful to the students if the teacher isn't just lecturing about science but is living it as well."

Another local program is the Bridging Education, Science, and Technology (BEST) Program, a collaboration between the NIEHS and Durham, North Carolina, public schools that takes up-to-the-minute technology into the schools, where interested students learn skills that may be used in a future career in environmental health science.

Hillside High School, one BEST partner, is the home of a prototype molecular biology laboratory and training center set up by the NIEHS. In addition to equipping the lab with state-of-the-art equipment for procedures such as polymerase chain reaction and gel electrophoresis, the institute also provided start-up training for Hillside science teachers. "The whole idea," says Marian Johnson-Thompson, NIEHS director of education and biomedical research development, "is to empower the schools and set up a mechanism whereby they are now able to self-sustain by going out and getting other resources." Accordingly, Hillside was recently awarded funding by the private Burroughs Wellcome Fund to establish a molecular biological preparation course in which high school juniors learn to use the lab equipment and perform basic science skills along with other important skills such as how to write a scientific paper and how to present and defend their research findings. As part of the course, each student has the opportunity to do a paid summer research internship at either the NIEHS Marine and Freshwater Biomedical Sciences Center at the Mount Desert Island Biological Laboratory (funded by the Burroughs Wellcome Fund) or the NIEHS. In their senior year, the students must write up their findings, participate in a poster session, and present the research they conducted over the summer in such forums as the North Carolina State Science Fair, the North Carolina Student Academy of Science, and, for the past two years, at the American Association for the Advancement of Science annual meeting. According to Kenneth Cutler, Hillside's project director for the Burroughs Wellcome Fund grant, most of the students in the Hillside molecular biology course go on to receive full or partial scholarships for college and are currently majoring in a science or math field. Johnson-Thompson says, "The program has really mushroomed; these kids are starting to get some outstanding recognition."

Not far away, another BEST partner, Durham's elementary-level C. C. Spaulding Biosphere Magnet School, was provided by the NIEHS with two computers as well as speakers, educational reading materials, and supplies, to use in conjunction with its free-standing Life Lab Biostation, which features natural amphibian, reptile, mammal, bird, and insect habitats, pond and river ecosystems, and an observation deck to watch the natural life surrounding the school. The different ecosystems within the biosphere correspond with classroom work at each grade level, so all the students are able to use the lab as a learning tool to complement their classwork, and institute staff act as visiting instructors at the school.

Finally, each year, the Annual Environmental Careers Symposium is held at the NIEHS, drawing around 200 students and teachers from area schools. The event features speakers and exhibitors from nearby universities, other federal agencies, and research organizations, who present information on environmental health science and related fields including public policy, environmental law, and environmental medicine. Participants attend five half-hour talks and have the chance to talk to scientists and find out what's involved in becoming a scientist, including information on summer programs and college degree offerings in the environmental sciences and related fields.

As the NIEHS K-12 programs mature and grow, so grows a new generation of students who learn early on that science is good stuff.