Increased interest in physiology and science among adolescents after presentations and activities administered by undergraduate physiology students.

BEGINNING IN THE 1980S, the Brazilian government introduced strategies to promote universal access to primary education, which coincided with an increase in the number of 6-yr-old children entering the educational system and the expansion of the public high school system (10). More recently, recognition of the importance of access to education at different life stages (4) and the building of contextualized and critical knowledge have been highlighted in Brazilian schools. Physiology is a science with important applications in daily life. Basic education of students about the tenants of physiology begins in elementary school by teaching students aspects related to the function and organization of the human body. Many concepts of physiology, however, are presented as isolated topics with no association to context and/or implications in daily life of the students. Beginning in 1996, the Brazilian educational system has enacted regulations to promote developmental innovation and meet challenging goals. It is expected that universities stimulate teaching, research, and community outreach activities in an integrative and complementary manner to promote the distribution, creation, systematization, and transformation of knowledge through articulation between theory and practice (11a). In this context, research assumes the role to improve and disseminate new knowledge by exposing university students to an integrative experience of teaching, research, and community participation (11). Previous studies have reported the benefits of various programs to promote the integration of universities with local school systems by orchestrating outreach activities by visits of leading academics and scientists to schools to promote the dissemination of knowledge as well as to inspire and motivate more students to study science (5, 6). The American Physiology Society annually promotes an outreach program to approach schools and universities/scientists: the Physiology Understanding Week (PhUn Week). The aims of PhUn Week are to 1) increase student interest and understanding of the presence of physiology in daily life, 2) increase the recognition of physiology in the standard science core curriculum, 3) introduce students to physiology as a possible career, and 4) to involve more physiologists in community outreach programs aimed at students and teachers (http://www.theaps.org/mm/Education/K-12/EducationProjects/PhUn-Week). PhUn Week is a good example of an outreach activity to promote physiology dissemination. In this article, we present a set of activities performed in south Brazil that are aligned with the objectives of PhUn Week and promote the integration between universities and public schools and dissemination of knowledge of physiology. To achieve this goal, we adopted a program in which undergraduate physiology students visit schools. We reasoned that undergraduate students, previously trained in physiology, could better impact the interest and motivation of students toward science than physiology researchers, since these two groups of students are closer in age. Thus, the objective of this work was to share knowledge of physiology and demonstrate the presence of physiology in daily life to promote the interest of students in physiology and science. Here, we describe the activities developed in this sense and their impact. We hypothesized that such activities will improve knowledge and increase general interest in physiology and science among students.