Abstract
Education about virus biology at school is of pivotal interest to raise public awareness concerning means of disease transmission and, thus, methods to prevent infection, and to reduce unnecessary antibiotic treatment due to patient pressure on physicians in case of viral diseases such as influenza. This study aimed at making visible the knowledge of Austrian high school and university students with respect to virus biology, virus structure and health-education issues. The data presented here stem from comprehensive questionnaire analyses, including the task to draw a virus, from a cross-sectional study with 133 grade 7 and 199 grade 10 high school students, and 133 first-year biology and 181 first-year non-biology university students. Analyses were performed both quantitatively and qualitatively. ANOVA revealed a highly significant group effect for total knowledge relating to virus biology and health issues (F(3, 642) = 44.17, p < 0.01, η2p = 0.17). Specific post-hoc tests by means of the Tukey test showed significant differences between all groups (p < .01) with the exception of 1st year non-biology students and grade 10 high school students. Students enrolled in university-level biology outperformed all other groups, even though they had not yet encountered this topic at their courses; part of this phenomenon might be due to their affinity for learning about biological topics. However, even many first-year biology students had a high number of severe misconceptions, e.g., defining a virus as a pro- or eukaryotic cell, or falsely naming malaria as a viral disease. Since there was no significant difference in virus-related knowledge between high schools, virus biology seems to have been taught similarly among the tested schools. However, the majority of participants stated that the virus-related knowledge they had acquired at school was not sufficient. Based on the results presented here we urgently suggest improving and intensifying teaching this topic at school, since virus-related knowledge was by far too fragmentary among many participants. Such lack of health-relevant knowledge may contribute to pressure on physicians by patients to unnecessarily prescribe antibiotics, and possibly lead to potentially dangerous neglect concerning vaccination. The effectiveness of newly developed virus-related teaching units and material could be tested with the instrument used here.
Highlights
Any year passes by without a viral disease catching public attention
Our hypothesis was that knowledge would increase as a function of age, though university students studying biology might be better informed about viruses than their peers studying different subjects due to possibly higher interest in viruses
Our study shows that knowledge concerning viruses, their biology and their importance as causal agents for various diseases distinct from bacterial diseases is rather fragmentary even among university students, it should be remarked positively that knowledge did increase with age and, students seemed to have learnt aspects of viral biology at school, which confirms our hypothesis
Summary
Any year passes by without a viral disease catching public attention. Recently, the Zika virus was on the run, both as an epidemic and in the media. Viruses as a topic in the media may influence students’ perception of the importance of virus-related knowledge as well as their own factual knowledge. This may not always happen directly, especially with younger students, but may be mediated by other family members. Educational studies about virus-related issues have hitherto mostly been interested in knowledge about ways of transmission and prevention of infection. A second reason for this study was cumulative evidence that many clinicians and general practitioners sometimes unnecessarily prescribe antibiotics, e.g. for patients with acute respiratory infections [7,8,9] Most often, this is not due to lack of relevant knowledge. Our hypothesis was that knowledge would increase as a function of age, though university students studying biology might be better informed about viruses than their peers studying different subjects due to possibly higher interest in viruses
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