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Although almost everyone agrees that the environment shapes children's learning, surprisingly few studies assess in detail the specific environments that shape children's learning of specific content. The present article briefly reviews examples of how such environmental assessments have improved understanding of child development in diverse areas, and examines in depth the contributions of analyses of one type of environment to one type of learning: how biased distributions of problems in mathematics textbooks influence children's learning of fraction arithmetic. We find extensive parallels between types of problems that are rarely presented in US textbooks and problems where children in the US encounter greater difficulty than might be expected from the apparent difficulty of the procedures involved. We also consider how some children master fraction arithmetic despite also learning the textbook distributions. Finally, we present findings from a recent intervention that indicates how children's fraction learning can be improved. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Disease outbreaks devastate Pyropia aquaculture farms every year. The three most common and serious diseases are Olpidiopsis‐blight and red‐rot disease caused by oomycete pathogens and green‐spot disease caused by the PyroV1 virus. We hypothesized that a basic genetic profile of molecular defenses will be revealed by comparing and analyzing the genetic response of Pyropia tenera against the above three pathogens. RNAs isolated from infected thalli were hybridized onto an oligochip containing 15,115 primers designed from P. tenera expressed sequence tags (EST)s. Microarray profiles of the three diseases were compared and interpreted together with histochemical observation. Massive amounts of reactive oxygen species accumulated in P. tenera cells exposed to oomycete pathogens. Heat shock genes and serine proteases were the most highly up‐regulated genes in all infection experiments. Genes involved in RNA metabolism, ribosomal proteins and antioxidant metabolism were also highly up‐regulated. Genetic profiles of P. tenera in response to pathogens were most similar between the two biotrophic pathogens, Olpidiopsis pyropiae and PyroV1 virus. A group of plant resistance genes were specifically regulated against each pathogen. Our results suggested that disease response in P. tenera consists of a general constitutive defense and a genetic toolkit against specific pathogens. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background The seductive allure of neuroscience explanations ( SANE) is the finding that people overweight psychological arguments when framed in terms of neuroscience findings. Aim This study extended this finding to arguments concerning the application of psychological findings to educational topics. Sample Participants ( n = 320) were recruited from the general public, specifically among English-speaking Amazon Mechanical Turk workers residing in the United States. Methods We developed eight articles that orthogonally varied two processes (learning vs. development) with two disciplines (cognitive vs. affective psychology). We increased neuroscience framing across four levels: psychological finding alone, with an extraneous neuroscience finding (verbal), with an extraneous neuroscience finding (verbal) and graph, and with an extraneous neuroscience finding (verbal) and brain image. Participants were randomly assigned to one level of neuroscience framing and rated the credibility of each article's argument. Results Seductive allure of neuroscience explanations effects were not ubiquitous. Extraneous verbal neuroscience framings, either alone or accompanied by graphs, did not influence the credibility of the application of psychological findings to educational topics. However, there was a SANE effect when educational articles were accompanied by both extraneous verbal neuroscience findings and brain images. This effect persisted even after controlling for individual differences in familiarity with education, attitude towards psychology, and knowledge of neuroscience. Conclusion The results suggest that there is a SANE effect for articles about educational topics among the general public when they are accompanied by both extraneous verbal neuroscience findings and brain images. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]