Evolving germs – Antibiotic resistance and natural selection in education and public communication

Abstract

Bacterial resistance to antibiotics threatens modern healthcare on a global scale. Several actors in society, including the general public, must become more involved if this development is to be countered. The conveyance of relevant information provided through education and media reports is therefore of high concern. Antibiotic resistance evolves through the mechanisms of natural selection; in this way, a sound understanding of these mechanisms underlies explanations of causes and the development of effective risk-reduction measures. In addition to natural selection functioning as an explanatory framework to antibiotic resistance, bacterial resistance as a context seems to possess a number of qualities that make it suitable for teaching natural selection -a subject that has been proven notoriously hard to teach and learn. A recently suggested approach for learning natural selection involves so-called threshold concepts, which encompass abstract and integrative ideas. The threshold concepts associated with natural selection include, among others, the notions of randomness as well as vast spatial and temporal scales. Illustrating complex relationships between concepts on different levels of organization is one, of several, areas where visualizations are efficient. Given the often-imperceptible nature of threshold concepts as well as the fact that natural selection processes occur on different organizational levels, visual accounts of natural selection have many potential benefits for learning.Against this background, the present dissertation explores information conveyed to the public regarding antibiotic resistance and natural selection, as well as investigates how these topics are presented together, by scrutinizing media including news reports, websites, educational textbooks and online videos. The principal method employed in the media studies was content analysis, which was complemented with various other analytical procedures. Moreover, a classroom study was performed, in which novice pupils worked with a series of animations explaining the evolution of antibiotic resistance. Data from individual written assignments, group questions and video-recorded discussions were collected and analyzed to empirically explore the potential of antibiotic resistance as a context for learning about evolution through natural selection.Among the findings are that certain information, that is crucial for the public to know, about antibiotic resistance was conveyed to a low extent through wide-reaching news reporting. Moreover, explanations based on natural selection were rarely included in accounts of antibiotic resistance in any of the examined media. Thus, it is highly likely that a large proportion of the population is never exposed to explanations for resistance development ii during education or through newspapers. Furthermore, the few examples that were encountered in newspapers or textbooks were hardly ever visualized, but presented only in textual form. With regard to videos purporting to explain natural selec...

[ITAL]HUBBLE SPACE TELESCOPE[/ITAL][ITAL]Hubble Space Telescope[/ITAL] Observations of the Planetary Nebula K648 in the Globular Cluster M15

“…The K 648 central star was also observed with the HST's Faint Object Spectrograph (FOS). The unpublished HST/FOS spectrum was kindly provided in electronic form by R. Bohlin (2000), calibrated on the white dwarf scale according to Bohlin (1996) and Bohlin, Lindler, & Keyes (1995). The uncertainty in FOS absolute fluxes are estimated to be ∼5% for this spectrum.…”

Configuration and gradual dynamics of prominence-related X-ray coronal cavities

“…These X-ray arches are closely related to coronal arches observed in visible light above the cavity (Balanovsky and Perepelkin, 1928;Wallenquist, 1957;Leroy and Servajen, 1966;Kawaguchi, 1967;Saito and Hyder, 1968;Fort and Martres, 1974). Furthermore, EUV observations have shown that cavities are evident also in EUV lines formed at coronal temperatures (such as Ne vii and Mg x), while lines typical of the transition region are present at the wominence-corona interface (Noyes et al, 1972;Schmahl et al, 1974;Orrall and Schmahl, 1976;Bohlin, 1976). The presence of these coronal cavities seems to suggest that the prominence material is condensed from the corona.…”

EvoSketch: Simple simulations for learning random and probabilistic processes in evolution, and effects of instructional support on learners’ conceptual knowledge

“…The limited duration of the learning session (the intervention time was roughly 45 min) may have affected several of the performance results, particularly CINS scores. There are a few studies indicating that learning evolutionary concepts in very short time (i.e., one or two lessons or hours) can result in higher knowledge (e.g., Beardsley et al 2012;Bohlin 2017;Lee et al 2017;Yamanoi and Iwasaki 2015). However, evolution education research also shows that the theory of evolution presents severe problems to learners, which have not been effectively solved by teaching strategies applied to date (e.g., Kampourakis and Zogza 2008;Rosengren et al 2012).…”

“…Concerning this, the timeframe for the intervention was highly restricted. Nevertheless, studies indicated that even short learning periods could improve student's knowledge acquisition (e.g., Bohlin 2017;Eckhardt et al 2013;Yamanoi and Iwasaki 2015). The timeframe should have been fine for investigating the effectiveness of EvoSketch simulations and the respective self-directed instructional support.…”