Six Essential Questions and Enduring Understandings

EDASE is based on pedagogical principles suggested in Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe's text, Understanding by Design. Wiggins and McTighe advocate that curricula can be built by identifying enduring understandings and essential questions. An enduring understanding is a big idea that resides at the heart of a discipline and has lasting value outside the classroom. An essential question is a question that can be answered when the enduring understanding is achieved.

Below, we state the essential questions in ways that explore drug use and state the enduring understandings in a more generic way in order to emphasize their applicability for exploring other health-related issues.

	Essential Questions	Enduring Understandings
1	Who uses drugs? When do they use drugs? Where do they use drugs?	Health-related conditions and behaviors are not distributed uniformly in a population. Each has a unique distribution that can be discovered by identifying how it is distributed in a population, in terms of person, place and time.
2	What could explain why some people use drugs and others do not?	Clues for formulating hypotheses can be found by describing the way a health-related condition or behavior is distributed in a population of people, in terms of person, place and time.
3	Is there an association between the hypothesized cause and drug use?	Causal hypotheses can be tested by observing the exposures and outcomes that people experience as they go about their lives. Information from these observational studies can be used to calculate risks and relative risks and identify associations.
4	Is the association, between the hypothesized cause and drug use, causal?	Causation is only one explanation for finding an association between an exposure and an outcome. Because observational studies are flawed, other explanations must also be considered.
5	What should be done when a preventable cause of drug use is identified?	When a causal association has been identified, decisions about possible prevention strategies are based on more than the scientific evidence. Because of competing values, social, economic, and political factors must also be considered.
6	Did the drug use prevention strategy work?	The effectiveness of a prevention strategy can be evaluated by making and comparing risks of an outcome in populations of people who were and were not exposed to the strategy. Costs, trade-offs and alternative strategies must also be considered.