Fostering conceptual change and critical reasoning about HIV and AIDS

One of the challenges of science education is for students to develop scientific knowledge that is personally meaningful and applicable to real-life issues. This article describes a middle-school science intervention fostering adolescents' critical reasoning in the context of HIV by strengthening their conceptual understanding of HIV biology. The intervention included two components: critical reasoning activities that fostered knowledge integration and application to real-world problem solving, and science writing activities that promoted argument building. Two seventh-grade classes participated in the study. One class participated in the critical reasoning and writing activities (CR&W); the other class participated in critical reasoning activities only (CR group). Results demonstrate significant pre- and posttest improvements on measures of students' HIV knowledge, HIV understanding, and critical reasoning about realistic scenarios in the context of HIV, with the improvements being greater in the CR&W group. The discussion focuses on the role of conceptual knowledge in health reasoning, the role of science writing in fostering knowledge integration, and the benefits of a "thinking curriculum" approach to integrated health and science education.