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Abstract

This study investigates high school students’ health-information seeking behaviors related to COVID-19 and viruses in a rural area of the south-central United States, and how these behaviors relate to students’ knowledge, perceptions, and learning interests. Survey data were collected from 83 students in Spring 2023, during the post-pandemic period, as part of a STEM and public health unit. Drawing on frameworks from Health Information-Seeking Behavior and student interest, the study examines students’ COVID-19 information sources, how these sources relate to their knowledge about viruses and their perceptions of COVID-19, and the specific topics about which they were most interested in learning. Our analysis showed that students most frequently reported using governmental health agencies, healthcare professionals, and mainstream media as sources of COVID-19 information, while science teachers were rarely cited. Students with higher general knowledge about COVID-19 were more likely to support individual protective behaviors such as mask-wearing. Thematic analysis of students’ open-ended responses (N = 233) revealed strong interest in learning about COVID-19 biology, treatment, and origin, with less expressed interest in vaccines. These findings highlight the importance of connecting students lived experiences with disciplinary knowledge by integrating the information sources they already use into science instruction. Insights from this work can inform science teaching and help educators better support students during future public health challenges.

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2026

Notes/Citation Information

© The Author(s) 2026. Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.

Digital Object Identifier (DOI)

https://doi.org/10.1186/s43031-026-00165-z

Funding Information

This work is supported by the National Institutes of Health RADx-rad Initiative (grant U01 DA053903-01), and the National Science Foundation, PIPP Phase II: Environmental Surveillance for Assessing Pathogen Emergence (ESCAPE) (Award #2412446).

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