The Pharmacology Education Partnership: Improving High School Biology and
Chemistry
The Pharmacology Education Partnership (PEP) is a curriculum we developed for high school biology and chemistry teachers,
providing them with tools to teach biology and chemistry principles using pharmacology topics (e.g., drugs of abuse). This
partnership between Duke University Medical Center and the North Carolina School of Science and Math (NCSSM) was funded by a
Science Education Drug Abuse Partnership Award from the National Institute on Drug Abuse. The major premise of our project was
that high school students might learn basic concepts in biology and chemistry better if the material was presented in the context of
something interesting and relevant to their own lives. Forty-seven teachers across the US were trained to use the curriculum in their
classrooms (a second project is ongoing with ~220 teachers being trained across the US). The PEP project includes several
components such as curriculum design, science content, and professional development. The PEP project has been tested in 3500
students nationally and has demonstrated significant achievement in high school biology and chemistry in those classrooms using the
PEP modules. The results of the study were published in the Journal of Research in Science Teaching (Schwartz-Bloom and Halpin,
2003).
Drs. Schwartz-Bloom and Halpin will present workshops (1-hour, half-day, or full-day) throughout the year for high school teacher professional development in Biology and Chemistry. Teachers will learn how to incorporate the content from the PEP pharmacology modules into their teaching plans.
