Content Objectives
The “Economics and Community Health – The Wealth-Health Paradigm” unit focuses on the relationship between socio-economic factors and community health. It also provides a roadmap for teachers of similar content to incorporate data-driven lessons, integrated and experiential learning, and NGSS 3-D instruction into their curriculum. This newly developed unit serves as a much-needed improvement to the human population portion of my Advanced Placement Environmental Science (APES) course. It could also be revisited during the “Hazards to Human Health” unit since such hazards in developed regions are quite different than those in less developed regions. Currently in the population unit we discuss a wide range of topics pertaining to human population, ranging from population growth, environmental pressures, survivorship, causes of death, and the demographic transition that countries undergo as they industrialize and modernize their economies. In its current form, this unit requires a lot of reading and intake of information. In other words, students don’t do a whole lot, and with this unit, I change that. My overarching goal is for students to investigate the relationship between Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and cause of death data from the World Health Organization in order to develop a more in-depth understanding of how economic conditions are a major controller of community health.
There are several course objectives and aspects of the three-dimensional NGSS that I address in this unit. Specific to the course, students learn: (1) the Wealth-Health Paradigm can be explained by the phenomenon that, in general, people in less developed countries (low GDP) die from communicable diseases at young to middle age, while people in more developed countries (mid to high GDP) die from non-communicable diseases at middle to old age, (2) access to clean water, education, and healthcare in more developed countries alters survivorship and extends lifespans, and (3) advances in basic science and the tools developed by biomedical engineers (among others) have the potential to alter the Wealth-Health Paradigm by improving community health in less developed, low GDP countries.
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