# Addictive Behaviors: A collaborative co-design program to promote health literacy and career awareness in high schools

> **NIH NIH R25** · TUFTS UNIVERSITY BOSTON · 2024 · $245,584

## Abstract

The combined medical and economic impacts of addictions currently cost the US over a trillion dollars annually;
their social impact is incalculable. Whether we can mitigate these impacts depends on how successfully we
educate a literate citizenry to understand how many different triggers elicit addictive behaviors because they all
stimulate the same brain responses. Vulnerability peaks in the teen years, yet the skills needed to analyze and
evaluate the risks related to these triggers are rarely addressed in high school biology classrooms, with the result
that nearly half of US adults are ill prepared to make informed health decisions; historically underrepresented
groups (HUGs) are most affected. The skills in understanding and evaluating the science behind health and
disease are also needed to participate in STEM+M careers, so it is no surprise that the same communities are
also disproportionately underrepresented in the STEM+M workforce. Our goal is to redress this balance by
creating an engaging high school biology curriculum about the science behind addiction that dispels the stigma
around substance use, in the context of key competencies required for both health literacy and career
preparedness. The project builds on our extensive experience in high school health-science curriculum design
and teacher professional development (PD). Our specialist co-design team includes scientists and teachers with
experience in addiction and teaching students from HUGs. They will pose core questions - What triggers cause
addictive behaviors? How do they stimulate the reward pathway? How does the reward pathway cause
addiction? How can people prone to addictive behaviors be treated? and then deploy our novel, digitally
supported, role-playing case-based pedagogy that promotes key competencies of data analysis and claims
evaluation within a collaborative problem solving, career awareness framework. Successful implementation of
novel curricula requires intensive teacher support. Our PD model prepares teachers via self-paced, graduate
level, online learning and helps them teach via workshops that model strategies for enactment of novel
pedagogies together with mentor-supported Just-In-Time problem solving as they are in the classroom. But
students require self-efficacy (SE) to prime them for further action, whether changing health behavior or setting
career goals. We will use 3 instruments we designed and validated in a well-matched comparison study to
determine how effectively the curriculum fosters SE in health literacy and career awareness. Our approach meets
the need for high-quality, integrated curricula designed for 21st century learners that helps students build the
key competencies they need to make informed choices about their health and careers, while aligning with NIDA’s
strategic plan to reduce stigma.

## Key facts

- **NIH application ID:** 10886381
- **Project number:** 1R25GM154344-01
- **Recipient organization:** TUFTS UNIVERSITY BOSTON
- **Principal Investigator:** KARINA F MEIRI
- **Activity code:** R25 (R01, R21, SBIR, etc.)
- **Funding institute:** NIH
- **Fiscal year:** 2024
- **Award amount:** $245,584
- **Award type:** 1
- **Project period:** 2024-05-01 → 2025-02-28

## Primary source

NIH RePORTER: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/10886381

## Citation

> US National Institutes of Health, RePORTER application 10886381, Addictive Behaviors: A collaborative co-design program to promote health literacy and career awareness in high schools (1R25GM154344-01). Retrieved via AI Analytics 2026-05-29 from https://api.ai-analytics.org/grant/nih/10886381. Licensed CC0.

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