REACH to Encourage High School Science
REACH: Research Education on Air and Cardiovascular Health
By Erika Fredrickson
As a science teacher, Brett Taylor was always looking for ways to help his students understand and appreciate the scientific process. For 35 years, up until he retired in 2017, the Missoula high school educator focused on hands-on learning in his lab and outside the classroom. He says it isn’t an easy task giving kids a true scientific experience.
“In most science classes, you end up learning about somebody else’s science,” Taylor says. “You are verifying something people already know — and that’s not science.”
One tool that helped bolster Taylor’s hands-on curriculum was a program supported through UM’s School of Public and Community Health Sciences and the Center for Environmental Health Sciences. The program supports middle school and high school students who do original scientific research around the concepts of air pollution and health.
Taylor, who used the program for 12 years at Sentinel High School, says it allowed his students to grasp scientific concepts by immersing them in real-world and relevant investigations.
For instance, his students explored the particulate matter air pollution created by everything from cooking bacon to running on a dusty river trail or coal trains moving through town. Students develop a question, devise a hypothesis and come up with an experimental procedure to test that hypothesis. They collect data using air quality monitors, and then they ask questions about what the data tells them about their hypothesis. Was it valid or invalid? Why?
The seed for the UM program was planted 15 years ago when a student at Big Sky High School decided to use air samplers supplied by UM to collect data from the homes of 16 of his classmates. His junior chemistry project was an original scientific investigation into air quality, and it inspired science teachers at Big Sky to incorporate the air samplers into their own classrooms the following year.
Tony Ward, professor and chair at the UM School of Public and Community Health Sciences, has facilitated the program through UM from the beginning, and he has watched it catch fire.
“A year after Big Sky did it, Hellgate signed on,” Ward says. “And after that, Sentinel did. Now the program has spread beyond Missoula to about 50 classrooms throughout Montana, Idaho and Alaska.”
Recently, UM received a five-year, $1.2 million Science Education Partnership Award from the National Institute of General Medical Sciences of the National Institutes of Health. The SEPA grant will fund a new version of the program through the UM school called the Research Education on Air and Cardiovascular Health (REACH) program.
In its original form, the program focused on how air pollution might trigger asthmatic events or other forms of poor respiratory health using bulky $8,000 monitors. The new grant will focus on how air pollution affects cardiovascular health using more affordable, state-of-the-art equipment.
The samplers are the size of Go-Pro cameras, and the health monitors look like Fitbit watches, both of which students can easily wear throughout their day to sample air and measure heart rate, pulse rate, blood pressure and pulse oxygen levels. Students download the data to an Excel spreadsheet, and they can create a graph to see when and where exposure takes place.
“At home when you’re wearing this, you can see what air pollution you’re breathing,” Ward says. “Then you ride the bus to school, and you can see what particulate you breathe on the bus. Then you can measure what your exposure is in the classroom, where you spend almost eight hours a day.”
The new grant will provide educational opportunities for more than 5,000 students in Montana, Idaho and Alaska and support UM researchers and educators who will provide inquiry-based science lessons to prepare students for their yearlong projects. The benefits are far-reaching because teachers involved with the project get professional development and access to the vast knowledge at UM’s School of Public and Community Health Sciences. Students also get a leg up in terms of career mentoring.
Ward says the program had a huge impact on Missoula, but it’s really geared toward rural areas across the country that are more representative of small towns in Montana — places like Libby, Hamilton and Butte. That also includes Native American communities in Alaska and schools on the Nez Perce and Flathead reservations.
“They don’t have the same opportunities that well-funded schools in big cities have,” Ward says. “I think this program has been a more natural fit for those more rural and underserved communities.”
Students involved in the program often present their findings before their peers and mentors at a symposium on UM’s campus each May, where their projects are judged by a panel and prizes are awarded. Last year, the group that won first place did a project on how particulate from the air during the Seeley Lake fires affected admissions in the local hospitals — research that no one else was working on at the time.
Ward says staff from the local and state health departments often attend the symposium to see the kind of research being done, which goes to show that this kind of citizen research isn’t just a benefit to the kids doing it — it helps their communities as well.
“When you have a few hundred students using these types of air samplers doing really cutting-edge research projects, it opens up new research potential,” he says.
Taylor agrees. Since his retirement he has become the education coordinator for outreach projects in Ward’s UM department. With REACH, he has fully dedicated himself to the program and advocates for its myriad benefits. He sees the program as a pipeline for young people to explore public health and other studies at UM, and he says it has become a gateway to the sciences. For instance, he recently got a college graduation invitation from a former high school student of his.
“She started in my class not really liking science, saying she was not good at it,” he says. “But for this program, she did a project and her research team won that year. So this girl that came to my class, not very thrilled about science and not really thinking she was going to pursue science after high school, is now graduating in chemical engineering — one of the toughest science majors there is. And part of it was this program, being exposed to what science actually is.”
But REACH isn’t just about funneling students into the science and health fields. Taylor says even students who don’t go into the sciences still gain life lessons by doing original science.
“The goals of the program include getting kids more interested in science-based careers and specifically health careers,” Taylor says. “But we are also teaching kids to be problem solvers, to think critically, communicate and work collaboratively. Those are all the things they learn doing this kind of project.
“And I think the other thing is that even if they don’t go into science, it’s pretty important to have a citizenry that knows something about science.” •
