Project Summary / Abstract.
Scientific misconceptions are becoming increasingly pervasive and damaging to the national
interest. The ongoing SARS-CoV-2 pandemic has highlighted how misconceptions related to
infectious disease can pose serious medical, economic, and social challenges by increasing
non-compliance with public health recommendations and undermining trust in scientific
institutions. Unfortunately, once scientific misconceptions are adopted by an individual, they are
notoriously difficult to remediate by merely presenting the “correct” information. We need
educational programs and tools that integrate evidence-based information with broader societal
factors, representation of individual risk, and multiple representations of information to improve
our ability to correct misconceptions. Our goal is to create an innovative, sustainable, and
reproducible educational program that: (1) Creates and deploys an innovative game-based
simulation to educate users about infectious diseases, (2) Inspires young people from diverse
backgrounds to consider careers in biomedical research, (3) Provides teachers with engaging
and easily adopted digital tools that build students’ systems thinking and data science literacy
skills, and (4) Conducts innovative STEM education research about the remediation of
misconceptions using systems thinking and Advanced Learning Technologies.