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This study is a follow-up to the analysis of an inquiry-based learning activity applied to students in a public university in Brazil. We advocate that an effective education in immunology must incorporate elements that are essential to research in the area, such as generating and analysing data. These elements would empower students to apply science reasoning to face professional challenges. Our protocol included two of these elements: experimentation and abstraction. The utmost aim was to examine the production of argument by groups engaged in three different activities: 1) performing experiments and analysing the data generated; 2) reading papers on the subject (activation of complement) prior to the activities in (1), and 3) reading papers on the subject and analysing data generated by others. Our analysis reveals that guided scientific paper presentation was more influential than performing an experiment in terms of production of complex arguments. Additionally, we found that some groups merely described the data rather than relating the obtained data to the original question that led to the experiments. The findings described herein show the importance of engaging students in procedures that actually generate knowledge and thus incorporate scientific reasoning and discourse in higher immunology education.

This study is a follow-up to the analysis of an inquiry-based learning activity applied to students in a public university in Brazil. We advocate that an effective education in immunology must incorporate elements that are essential to research in the area, such as generating and analysing data. These elements would empower students to apply science reasoning to face professional challenges. Our protocol included two of these elements: experimentation and abstraction. The utmost aim was to examine the production of argument by groups engaged in three different activities: 1) performing experiments and analysing the data generated; 2) reading papers on the subject (activation of complement) prior to the activities in (1), and 3) reading papers on the subject and analysing data generated by others. Our analysis reveals that guided scientific paper presentation was more influential than performing an experiment in terms of production of complex arguments. Additionally, we found that some groups merely described the data rather than relating the obtained data to the original question that led to the experiments. The findings described herein show the importance of engaging students in procedures that actually generate knowledge and thus incorporate scientific reasoning and discourse in higher immunology education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The training of scientists for immunology can begin in undergraduate classes. Here we report our experience in the development and application of an inquiry-based learning activity with these characteristics for students of the biological sciences course. The results showed that the groups of students, when performing the inquiry-based learning activity, mobilize important epistemic operations for the construction of analyses of justifications and conclusions of the activity in various levels of epistemic status. The approach to immunology topics can be associated with an inquiry-based learning, with simple activities, low cost and that mobilize important skills of scientific literacy for the basic training of one in the field of immunology research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Leishmania major-infected TNF receptor 1 deficient (TNFR1 KO) mice resolve parasitism but fail to resolve lesions, while wildtype mice completely heal. We investigated the cell composition, cytokine production, and apoptosis in lesions from L. majorinfected TNFR1 KO and wild-type (WT) mice. Chronic lesions from L. major-infected TNFR1 KO mice presented larger number of CD8+ T and Ly6G+ cells. In addition, higher concentrations of mRNA for IFN-γ CCL2 and CCL5, as well as protein, but lower numbers of apoptotic cells, were found in lesions from TNFR1 KO mice than in WT, at late time points of infection. Our studies showed that persistent lesions in L. major-infected TNFR1 KO mice may be mediated by continuous migration of cells to the site of inflammation due to the presence of chemokines and also by lower levels of apoptosis. We suggest that this model has some striking similarities to the mucocutaneous clinical form of leishmaniasis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]