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Tests in educational contexts often start with easy tasks, assuming that this fosters positive experiences—a sense of control, higher valuing of the test, and more positive and less negative emotions. Although intuitive and widespread, this assumption lacks an empirical basis and a theoretical framework. We conducted a field experiment and randomly assigned 208 students to an easy-to-difficult or a difficult-to-easy condition in a mathematics test. Perceived challenge was measured along with control appraisals, value appraisals, and emotions (enjoyment, pride, anxiety, anger, boredom). While students starting with easy tasks felt less challenged than students starting with difficult tasks in Part 1, no differences emerged regarding control and value appraisals and emotions. In Part 2, students who had started with easy tasks proceeded to difficult tasks and reported a higher level of challenge, less value and control, and less positive and more negative emotions than students who proceeded from difficult-to-easy tasks. Control and value appraisals mediated the differences between the two conditions, especially regarding positive emotions. These results cast doubt on the preference for easy-to-difficult over difficult-to-easy task orders, revealing their potential for causing adverse experiences at the end of the test (e.g., reflecting contrast effects). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although anxiety consists of multiple components, including cognitive, affective, motivational, and physiological, and some findings suggest that there might be differences regarding their control antecedents and effects on performance, previous studies have largely neglected to examine these components separately and for reasons of convenience often assessed test anxiety as a unified construct using a single-item. Therefore, this study investigated the different test anxiety components with the goal to: (1) examine the relative impact of the anxiety components in the mediating mechanism that connects control and performance – as proposed by Pekrun's control-value theory, and (2) determine which specific anxiety component is underlying common single-item anxiety measures. The research questions were investigated using an intra-individual approach in a sample of N = 137 German 8th graders during a mathematics exam. As expected, control was negatively related to all anxiety components, but associations varied in strength. Additionally, the components differed in their relative impact on performance, with the cognitive component being central for this outcome. Furthermore, common single-item measures seem to specifically assess the affective component, and thus not the component most relevant for test performance. Consequently, our study strongly recommends to distinguish between the anxiety components depending on the research question at hand. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the role of the Grantham Corporation Minute Books and inventories brought from an apothecary's shop of Ralph Clarke and his son William Clarke, in the intellectual development of physicist Sir Isaac Newton during his stay in Grantham, England. Topics include rural health provision in the city, Newton's education in King's School in Lincolnshire, England, and his exposure to the art of apothecary.

In a series of lectures appended to his magisterial Anatomy of Plants (1682), Nehemiah Grew (1641–1712) explained the results of his own research into the saline chemistry of plants, following an established tradition in early modern chemistry. Members of the Royal Society such as Daniel Coxe were heavily involved in researching salt chemistry in the latter part of the seventeenth century, analysing the role of salts in spa waters, physiology, and as a fundamental element in iatrochemistry. Such researches of Royal Society members were often based upon the chemistry of Johann Van Helmont (1577–1634). As this paper will demonstrate, Grew's work drew from his microscopic research to elaborate and question some of Coxe's and hence Van Helmont's ideas about the principles of matter. Grew also used the results of his chemical research to draw conclusions about plant structure and colour, and applied his results to other areas in natural history such as meteorology, illustrating that chemistry was the basic analytical tool for seventeenth-century investigators of anatomy and natural history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Seventeenth-century physician Martin Lister is best known for his work in natural history and participation in the early Royal Society. However, little attention has been focused upon Lister's work in chemistry, the most salient examples being his analysis of pyrites or "fools' gold" near mineral springs in the De Fontibus medicates Angliae Exercitatio of 1684 (Exercises on the healing springs of England), his contributions to the Philosophical Transactions in the 1670s and 1680s, and his unpublished manuscript "A Method for the History of Iron, Imperfect." He defined pyrites more specifically as "ironstone marcasites" which were "nothing else but a body of iron disguised under a vitriolic varnish"; "vitriol" referred to iron (11) sulfate which occurred as a weathering product of pyrites. This paper demonstrates that an understanding of Lister's work on pyrites and vitriol is best attained by placing him in the intellectual context of the seventeenth-century chemical debate about minerallogenesis. Lister believed that the volatile exhalations of pyrites and its vitriol in the air were important in the transformation of matter, and he subscribed to the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century theory of witterung (weathering) or ore exhalations as an explanation for the formation of minerals. Despite his allegiance to the theories of witterung, I will illustrate that Lister made use of his interests in natural history to go one step beyond them, postulating that the sulfurous exhalations from pyrites were responsible for the heating of hot springs, as well as meteorological and geological effects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]