NeuroLab

We cordially invite 11th and 12th grade teachers to participate in the NeuroLab program.  Funded by a National Institutes of Health Science Education Partnership Award, NeuroLab is a multi-lesson, storyline-based instructional unit that links student questions about a rare and unusual movement disorder (the anchoring phenomenon) to interconnected science concepts, ideas, and data that span a diversity of life science disciplines. In partnership with high school science teachers, our scientists developed resources and strategies to help students build – in stepwise fashion – an explanatory model of the movement disorder as they pursue their questions in a collaborative classroom learning environment. To develop their models, students explore converging lines of behavioral, electrophysiological, neuroanatomical, molecular genetic, cellular, developmental, and neuroimaging data obtained from studies of human subjects and model organisms over the last several decades. The discoveries made by students through the analysis and interpretation of authentic data – which includes big data presented in authoritative databases used by biomedical scientists and physicians – are gradually assimilated into working models that form a major focus of classroom discourse. These models undergo periodic revision and gradually increase in complexity and explanatory power as students navigate through the NeuroLab sense-making trajectory.