This paper promotes the use of adapted primary literature as a curriculum and instruction innovation for use in high school. Adapted primary literature is useful for promoting an understanding of scientific and mathematical reasoning and argument and for introducing modern science into the schools. We describe a prototype adapted from a published article on a mathematical model of the spread of the West Nile virus in North America. The prototype is available as a web-based resource that includes supplemental pedagogical units. Preliminary feedback from use of the prototype in two classrooms is described and a sketch of an ongoing formal evaluation is provided.We and others (e.g., von Aufschnaiter et al. 2008) have pointed to two perennial failures in the high school science curriculum: first, failure to treat systematically and comprehensively the nature of scientific reasoning and argument and how they are connected to scientific conclusions; and, second, failure to introduce students to some of the most interesting and important ideas of modern science, particularly of interdisciplinary research. In this paper, we wish to exemplify how both of these failures can be addressed through the use of Adapted Primary Literature. We shall proceed by first offering a distinction between Primary Scientific Literature (PSL) and Adapted primary literature (APL). Second, we shall describe a prototype of APL that we have produced in the area of mathematical biology. We finally will report
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.