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Regular physical activity (PA) is beneficial for cognitive health, and cathepsin B (CTSB) - a protease released by skeletal muscle during PA - acts as a potential molecular mediator of this association. PA-induced metabolic and mechanical stress appears to increase plasma/serum CTSB levels. CTSB facilitates neurogenesis and synaptic plasticity in brain regions (e.g., hippocampus and prefrontal cortex) that support performance in specific cognitive domains including memory, learning, and executive function. However, the evidence regarding the role of PA-induced changes in CTSB as a mediator of PA-induced cognitive health in humans is mixed. To guide future research, this article identifies key factors that may explain the observed heterogeneity in the findings from human studies and proposes a PA-CTSB-cognition model., Competing Interests: Declaration of interests The authors declare no competing interests., (Copyright © 2024 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.)

Interaction analysis using linear regression is widely employed in psychology and related fields, yet it often induces confusion among applied researchers and students. This paper aims to address this confusion by developing intuitive visual explanations based on causal graphs. By leveraging causal graphs with distinct interaction nodes, we provide clear insights into interpreting main effects in the presence of interaction, the rationale behind centering to reduce multicollinearity, and other pertinent topics. The proposed graphical approach could serve as a useful complement to existing algebraic explanations, fostering a more comprehensive understanding of the mechanics of linear interaction analysis., (© 2024 The British Psychological Society.)

Three IRT diagnostic-classification-modeling (DCM)-based multiple choice (MC) item design principles are stated that improve classroom quiz student diagnostic classification. Using proven-optimal maximum likelihood-based student classification, example items demonstrate that adherence to these item design principles increases attribute (skills and especially misconceptions) correct classification rates (CCRs). Simple formulas compute these needed item CCRs. By use of these psychometrically driven item design principles, hopefully enough attributes can be accurately diagnosed by necessarily short MC-item-based quizzes to be widely instructionally useful. These results should then stimulate increased use of well-designed MC item quizzes that target accurately diagnosing skills/misconceptions, thereby enhancing classroom learning., (© 2022. The Author(s) under exclusive licence to The Psychometric Society.)

Background: Stress is highly prevalent in patients with ischemic heart disease (IHD) and is associated with lower health-related quality of life and impaired cardiovascular outcome. The importance of stress management is now recognized in recent guidelines for the management of cardiovascular disease. However, effective stress management interventions are not implemented in clinical routine yet. The development of easily disseminated eHealth interventions, particularly mHealth, may offer a cost-effective and scalable solution to this problem. The aim of the proposed trial is to assess the efficiency and cost-effectiveness of the mHealth intervention "mindfulHeart" in terms of reducing stress in patients with IHD., Methods and Analysis: This randomized controlled confirmatory interventional trial with two parallel arms has assessments at six measurement time points: baseline (T0, prior randomization), post-treatment (T1), and four follow-ups at months 1, 3, 6, and 12 after intervention (T2, T3, T4, and T5). We will include patients with confirmed diagnosis of IHD, high-perceived stress, and use of an internet-enabled smartphone. Patients will be randomized into two groups (intervention vs. control). The proposed sample size calculation allocates 128 participants in total. The primary analysis will be performed in the intention-to-treat population, with missing data imputed. An ANCOVA with the outcome at T1, a between-subject factor (intervention vs. control), and the participants' pre-intervention baseline values as a covariate will be used. Different ANOVAs, regression, and descriptive approaches will be performed for secondary analyses., Ethics: The Ethics Committee of the Medical Faculty of the University of Duisburg-Essen approved the study (22-11,015-BO)., Trial Registration: ClinicalTrials NCT05846334. Release 26.04.2023., (© 2023. BioMed Central Ltd., part of Springer Nature.)

How do people reason with data to make sense of the world? What implications might everyday practices hold for data literacy education? We leverage the unique context of the COVID-19 pandemic to shed light on these questions. COVID-19 has engendered a complex, multimodal ecology of information resources, with which people engage in high-stakes sensemaking and decision-making. We take a relational approach to data literacy, examining how people navigate and interpret data through interactions with tools and other people. Using think-aloud protocols, a diverse group of people described their COVID-19 information-seeking practices while working with COVID-19 information resources they use routinely. Although participants differed in their disciplinary background and proficiency with data, they each consulted data frequently and used it to make sense of life in the pandemic. Three modes of interacting with data were examined: scanning, looking closer and puzzling through. In each of these modes, we examined the balance of agency between people and their tools; how participants experienced and managed emotions as part of exploring data; and how issues of trust mediated their sensemaking. Our findings provide implications for cultivating more agentic publics, using a relational lens to inform data literacy education., Practitioner Notes: What is already known about this topic Many people, even those with higher education, struggle with interpreting quantitative data representations.Social and emotional factors influence cognition and learning.People are often overwhelmed by the abundance of available information online.There is a need for data literacy approaches that are humanistic and relational . What this paper adds Everyday data practices can be variable and adaptable, and include engaging with data at different levels: scanning, looking closer, and puzzling through. Each of these modes involves different data practices.People, independently of their quantitative interpretation skills and disciplinary backgrounds, may engage differently with data (eg, avoiding versus delving deeper) based on their emotional responses, level of trust or interpersonal relationships that are evoked by the data.These everyday data practices have implications for people's sense of their own agency with data and involve emotional and trust-based relationships that shape their interpretations of data. These relational aspects of data literacy suggest productive directions for data literacy education. Implications for practice and/or policy Data literacy can be taught as a process that is inherently relational, for example, by discussing the ways in which learners are personally connected to different data, what emotions these connections evoke, and how that affects the ways in which they attend to, trust and interpret the data.Data literacy education can cultivate a wider range of data practices at a variety of depths of interaction, rather than prioritizing only in-depth inquiry.It may be helpful to include complex experiences with data sources that require learners to go beyond a binary "trustworthy/untrustworthy" distinction, so that learners can become more strategic, nuanced and intentional in forming a variety of trust relationships with different sources.Discussing how learners' everyday data practices interact with different data representations and tools can help them become more critically aware of the possible purposes, values, and risks associated with their everyday data practices., Competing Interests: No conflicts of interest were identified in this study., (© 2022 The Authors. British Journal of Educational Technology published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of British Educational Research Association.)

Spatial skills are an important component of success in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) fields. A majority of what we know about spatial skills today is a result of more than 100 years of research focused on understanding and identifying the kinds of skills that make up this skill set. Over the last two decades, the field has recognized that, unlike the spatial skills measured by psychometric tests developed by psychology researchers, the spatial problems faced by STEM experts vary widely and are multifaceted. Thus, many psychological researchers have embraced an interdisciplinary approach to studying spatial thinking with the aim of understanding the nature of this skill set as it occurs within STEM disciplines. In a parallel effort, discipline-based education researchers specializing in STEM domains have focused much of their research on understanding how to bolster students' skills in completing domain-specific spatial tasks. In this paper, we discuss four lessons learned from these two programs of research to enhance the field's understanding of spatial thinking in STEM domains. We demonstrate each contribution by aligning findings from research on three distinct STEM disciplines: structural geology, surgery, and organic chemistry. Lastly, we discuss the potential implications of these contributions to STEM education.

Sketching as a scientific practice goes beyond the simple act of inscribing diagrams onto paper. Scientists produce a wide range of representations through sketching, as it is tightly coupled to model-based reasoning. Chemists in particular make extensive use of sketches to reason about chemical phenomena and to communicate their ideas. However, the chemical sciences have a unique problem in that chemists deal with the unseen world of the atomic-molecular level. Using sketches, chemists strive to develop causal mechanisms that emerge from the structure and behavior of molecular-level entities, to explain observations of the macroscopic visible world. Interpreting these representations and constructing sketches of molecular-level processes is a crucial component of student learning in the modern chemistry classroom. Sketches also serve as an important component of assessment in the chemistry classroom as student sketches give insight into developing mental models, which allows instructors to observe how students are thinking about a process. In this paper we discuss how sketching can be used to promote such model-based reasoning in chemistry and discuss two case studies of curricular projects, CLUE and The Connected Chemistry Curriculum, that have demonstrated a benefit of this approach. We show how sketching activities can be centrally integrated into classroom norms to promote model-based reasoning both with and without component visualizations. Importantly, each of these projects deploys sketching in support of other types of inquiry activities, such as making predictions or depicting models to support a claim; sketching is not an isolated activity but is used as a tool to support model-based reasoning in the discipline., (Copyright © 2017 Cognitive Science Society, Inc.)

The global biodiversity crisis requires an engaged citizenry that provides collective support for public policies and recognizes the consequences of personal consumption decisions. Understanding the factors that affect personal engagement in proenvironmental behaviors is essential for the development of actionable conservation solutions. Zoos and aquariums may be some of the only places where many people can explore their relations with wild animals and proenvironmental behaviors. Using a moderated-mediation analysis of a survey of U.S. zoo and aquarium visitors (n = 3588), we explored the relationship between the sense of connection to animals and self-reported engagement in proenvironmental behaviors related to climate change and how this relationship is affected by certainty that climate change is happening, level of concern about climate change, and perceptions of effectiveness in personally addressing climate change. We found a significant, directional relationship between sense of connection to animals and self-reported proenvironmental behaviors. Political inclination within the conservative to liberal spectrum did not affect the relationship. We conclude that a personal sense of connection to animals may provide a foundation for educational and communication strategies to enhance involvement in proenvironmental actions., (© 2016 The Authors. Conservation Biology published by Wiley Periodicals, Inc. on behalf of Society for Conservation Biology.)

Proficiency in science is being defined through performance expectations that intertwine science practices, cross-cutting concepts, and core content knowledge. These descriptions of what it means to know and do science pose challenges for assessment design and use, whether at the classroom instructional level or the system level for monitoring the progress of science education. There are systematic ways to approach assessment development that can address design challenges, as well as examples of the application of such principles in science assessment. This Review considers challenges and opportunities that exist for design and use of assessments that can support science teaching and learning consistent with a contemporary view of what it means to be proficient in science.

Learning to read--amazing as it is to small children and their parents--is one thing. Reading to learn, explains Susan Goldman of the University of Illinois at Chicago, is quite another. Are today's students able to use reading and writing to acquire knowledge, solve problems, and make decisions in academic, personal, and professional arenas? Do they have the literacy skills necessary to meet the demands of the twenty-first century? To answer these questions, Goldman describes the increasingly complex comprehension, reasoning skills, and knowledge that students need as they progress through school and surveys what researchers and educators know about how to teach those skills. Successfully reading to learn requires the ability to analyze, synthesize, and evaluate information from multiple sources, Goldman writes. Effective readers must be able to apply different knowledge, reading, and reasoning processes to different types of content, from fiction to history and science, to news accounts and user manuals. They must assess sources of information for relevance, reliability, impartiality, and completeness. And they must connect information across multiple sources. In short, successful readers must not only use general reading skills but also pay close attention to discipline-specific processes. Goldman reviews the evidence on three different instructional approaches to reading to learn: general comprehension strategies, classroom discussion, and disciplinary content instruction. She argues that building the literacy skills necessary for U.S. students to read comprehensively and critically and to learn content in a variety of disciplines should be a primary responsibility for all of the nation's teachers. But outside of English, few subject-area teachers are aware of the need to teach subject-area reading comprehension skills, nor have they had opportunities to learn them themselves. Building the capacity of all teachers to meet the literacy needs of today's students requires long-term investment and commitment from the education community as well as society as a whole.

Recent theories in numerical cognition propose the existence of an approximate number system (ANS) that supports the representation and processing of quantity information without symbols. It has been claimed that this system is present in infants, children, and adults, that it supports learning of symbolic mathematics, and that correctly harnessing the system during tuition will lead to educational benefits. Various experimental tasks have been used to investigate individuals' ANSs, and it has been assumed that these tasks measure the same system. We tested the relationship across six measures of the ANS. Surprisingly, despite typical performance on each task, adult participants' performances across the tasks were not correlated, and estimates of the acuity of individuals' ANSs from different tasks were unrelated. These results highlight methodological issues with tasks typically used to measure the ANS and call into question claims that individuals use a single system to complete all these tasks.

Children take years to learn symbolic arithmetic. Nevertheless, non-human animals, human adults with no formal education, and human infants represent approximate number in arrays of objects and sequences of events, and they use these capacities to perform approximate addition and subtraction. Do children harness these abilities when they begin to learn school mathematics? In two experiments in different schools, kindergarten children from diverse backgrounds were tested on their non-symbolic arithmetic abilities during the school year, as well as on their mastery of number words and symbols. Performance of non-symbolic arithmetic predicted children's mathematics achievement at the end of the school year, independent of achievement in reading or general intelligence. Non-symbolic arithmetic performance was also related to children's mastery of number words and symbols, which figured prominently in the assessments of mathematics achievement in both schools. Thus, non-symbolic and symbolic numerical abilities are specifically related, in children of diverse socio-economic backgrounds, near the start of mathematics instruction.

When children learn to count and acquire a symbolic system for representing numbers, they map these symbols onto a preexisting system involving approximate nonsymbolic representations of quantity. Little is known about this mapping process, how it develops, and its role in the performance of formal mathematics. Using a novel task to assess children's mapping ability, we show that children can map in both directions between symbolic and nonsymbolic numerical representations and that this ability develops between 6 and 8 years of age. Moreover, we reveal that children's mapping ability is related to their achievement on tests of school mathematics over and above the variance accounted for by standard symbolic and nonsymbolic numerical tasks. These findings support the proposal that underlying nonsymbolic representations play a role in children's mathematical development.

Symbolic arithmetic is fundamental to science, technology and economics, but its acquisition by children typically requires years of effort, instruction and drill. When adults perform mental arithmetic, they activate nonsymbolic, approximate number representations, and their performance suffers if this nonsymbolic system is impaired. Nonsymbolic number representations also allow adults, children, and even infants to add or subtract pairs of dot arrays and to compare the resulting sum or difference to a third array, provided that only approximate accuracy is required. Here we report that young children, who have mastered verbal counting and are on the threshold of arithmetic instruction, can build on their nonsymbolic number system to perform symbolic addition and subtraction. Children across a broad socio-economic spectrum solved symbolic problems involving approximate addition or subtraction of large numbers, both in a laboratory test and in a school setting. Aspects of symbolic arithmetic therefore lie within the reach of children who have learned no algorithms for manipulating numerical symbols. Our findings help to delimit the sources of children's difficulties learning symbolic arithmetic, and they suggest ways to enhance children's engagement with formal mathematics.