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ObjectivesTo determine whether hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) is safe and effective at preventing COVID-19 infections among health care workers (HCWs).MethodsIn a 1: 1 randomized, placebo-controlled, double-blind, parallel-group, superiority trial at 34 US clinical centers, 1360 HCWs at risk for COVID-19 infection were enrolled between April and November 2020. Participants were randomized to HCQ or matched placebo. The HCQ dosing included a loading dose of HCQ 600 mg twice on day 1, followed by 400 mg daily for 29 days. The primary outcome was a composite of confirmed or suspected COVID-19 clinical infection by day 30, defined as new-onset fever, cough, or dyspnea and either a positive SARS-CoV-2 polymerase chain reaction test (confirmed) or a lack of confirmatory testing due to local restrictions (suspected).ResultsStudy enrollment closed before full accrual due to recruitment challenges. The primary end point occurred in 41 (6.0%) participants receiving HCQ and 53 (7.8%) participants receiving placebo. No difference in the proportion of participants experiencing clinical infection (estimated difference of -1.8%, 95% confidence interval -4.6-0.9%, P = 0.20) was identified nor any significant safety issues.ConclusionOral HCQ taken as prescribed appeared safe among HCWs. No significant clinical benefits were observed. The study was not powered to detect a small but potentially important reduction in infection.Trial registrationNCT04334148.

Within physics education research (PER), resource theory has proven to be a useful framework for investigating knowledge and learning and informing instructional design. To analyze learning over longer timescales and across cases, PER scholars must first identify and describe the resources activated within and across physics contexts and domains. Despite its importance, a reliable method for identifying resources has not been clearly outlined. This paper presents guidelines for the design of research aimed at identifying knowledge resources. We begin by describing the origin, assumptions, and utility of resource theory. We then introduce methods of data collection and analysis. We end with a discussion of validity and reliability, drawing connections with general principles of qualitative research. With this work, we hope to promote coordination among the many PER scholars who utilize resource theory and to invite new scholars to join in its application and development.

BackgroundThe SARS CoV-2 virus has caused one of the deadliest pandemics in recent history, resulting in over 170 million deaths and global economic disruption. There remains an urgent need for clinical trials to test therapies for treatment and prevention.DesignAn online research platform was created to support a registry community of healthcare workers (HCWs) to understand their experiences and conduct clinical studies to address their concerns. The first study, HERO-HCQ, was a double-blind, multicenter, randomized, pragmatic trial to evaluate the superiority of hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) vs placebo for pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) of COVID-19 clinical infection in HCWs. Secondary objectives were to assess the efficacy of HCQ in preventing viral shedding of COVID-19 among HCWs and to assess the safety and tolerability of HCQ.MethodsHCWs joined the Registry and were pre-screened for trial interest and eligibility. Trial participants were randomized 1:1 to receive HCQ or placebo. On-site baseline assessment included a COVID-19 nasopharyngeal PCR and blood serology test. Weekly follow-up was done via an online portal and included screening for symptoms of COVID-19, self-reported testing, adverse events, and quality of life assessments. The on-site visit was repeated at Day 30.DiscussionThe HERO research platform offers an approach to rapidly engage, screen, invite and enroll into clinical studies using a novel participant-facing online portal interface and remote data collection, enabling limited onsite procedures for conduct of a pragmatic clinical trial. This platform may be an example for future clinical trials of common conditions to enable more rapid evidence generation.

Scientific observation is central to classroom inquiry and children's investigations and explanations in science. Young children can struggle with observation, and research has shown that professional scientists who engage in complex observation tasks, observe detailed patterns when they have well-developed disciplinary knowledge. However, fewer studies address how this observational expertise develops and its specific role as a component of disciplinary knowledge within a larger complex knowledge system. Grounded in an existing theory of conceptual change, Knowledge in Pieces (KiP), we view knowledge as a complex system consisting of both perceptual and inferential parts. We demonstrate how these perceptual and inferential parts can be related to each other in the developing knowledge systems of learners engaged in scientific observation in field geology. In the analysis we examine in-service science teachers' observations of bedrock while they were aiming to generate an understanding of the relevant historical geological processes. The analysis documents the moment-to-moment complex relationships between the perceptual and inferential parts of a knowledge system and thus offers an empirical account of how observation is situated within a knowledge system. The results challenge the notion that scientific observation is a simple skill by demonstrating how discipline-specific knowledge is mobilized during scientific observation in a field-based setting. This work has implications for science education instruction.

Computational thinking (CT) has been advocated as an essential problem solving skill students need to develop. Emphasizing on CT applied in both programming and everyday contexts, we developed a humanoid robotics curriculum and a computerized assessment instrument. We implemented the curriculum with six classes of 125 fifth graders. Quantitative methods were used to compare students' performance from pretest to posttest. Learning analytics techniques were applied to examine students' problem solving processes. The results showed that students' CT performance improved in both programming and everyday reasoning contexts and that the curriculum benefited students with varied initial performance. The study shed light on how to connect and assess CT in everyday reasoning and programming contexts.

There is growing interest in implementing reform-based lab courses in undergraduate physics that are student driven rather than instructor driven. In these courses, students develop and carry out experiments while simultaneously reasoning about their hypotheses, data collection procedures, collected evidence, and the relevant physics content. However, there is a limited understanding of how students reason in these types of labs. Using the theoretical framework of sensemaking, we examine qualitative observational data of undergraduates engaging in open-ended experimentation in reform-based introductory physics for life sciences labs. We examine the moment-by-moment details of students' sensemaking by focusing on a series of inconsistencies, specifically focusing on what the inconsistencies are "about" and what "moves" students enact during sensemaking to resolve them. We explore sensemaking about "conceptual" and "procedural" inconsistencies through a narrative case study analysis of a single group whose sensemaking is largely representative of the observed data corpus. We find that students engaged in sensemaking to resolve conceptual inconsistencies by juxtaposing hypotheses and evidence and critiquing and constructing scientific explanations, sometimes evoking elements of mechanistic reasoning. Comparably, we find that students engaged in sensemaking to resolve procedural inconsistencies by proposing and testing a series of causes towards modifying experimental procedures or apparatus. Overall, we find that student sensemaking about both types of inconsistencies is generally productive, given students' resolutions and experimental progress. Capturing detailed sensemaking about inconsistencies highlights the richness of students' reasoning processes in this understudied learning environment that is becoming more prevalent.

Small bowel adenocarcinoma (SBA) with peritoneal metastasis (PM) is rare and despite treatment with systemic chemotherapy, the prognosis is poor. However, there is emerging evidence that cytoreductive surgery (CRS) with hyperthermic intraperitoneal chemotherapy (HIPEC) may offer a survival benefit over systemic therapy alone. This systematic review will assess the effectiveness of CRS–HIPEC for SBA–PM.

Research in undergraduate physics and in K-12 science education has demonstrated challenges and successes in facilitating student engagement with reasoning practices associated with professional physicists. Here we focus on one important dimension of physics reasoning, using evidence to revise models. While this topic has been explored at the undergraduate level, less is known about younger students' physics reasoning, especially within the context of modeling and model revision, where measurement tools are less emphasized and where evidence is often observational qualitative data. Here we examine 7th graders' conversations about pieces of observational scientific evidence in their conceptual models of magnetism. We present a series of cases from a whole class discussion to illustrate students' productive reasoning using evidence while revising, challenging, and testing their scientific models. These cases illustrate how students reason about evidence in the context of canonical and noncanonical models of magnetism, specifically when different pieces of evidence contradict each other and when running the model is inconclusive. The results capture a variety of complex ways evidence can be productively used in reasoning with models, and, more importantly, show that middle school students' reasoning shares important similarities with more advanced physics reasoning, which can be leveraged when designing and building future instruction.

The use of video for in-service and pre-service teacher development has been gaining acceptance, and yet video remains a challenging and understudied tool. Many projects have used video to help pre-service and in-service teachers reflect on their own teaching processes, examine teacher–student interactions, and develop their professional vision. But rarely has video been used in ways more akin to qualitative education research that is focused on student learning. Even more rarely has this focus occurred at the earliest stages of pre-service teaching when students have not yet decided to pursue teaching careers. Yet here we argue that there are benefits to our approach. We examine a course for prospective pre-service math and science teachers at the University of California, Berkeley, that engages participants in qualitative video analysis to foster their reflective practice. This course is unique in that the prospective pre-service teachers engage in qualitative video analysis at a level characteristic of professional educational research, in that their analysis focuses on student learning of math and science content. We describe classroom activities that provide opportunities for the preservice teacher participants to better observe, notice, and interpret their students’ sociocognitive activity. The course culmination project involves participants developing and teaching lessons in a high school classroom. The participants then videotape the lessons and conduct qualitative video analysis. Results include detailed examples of two selected prospective pre-service teachers demonstrating coherent and effective approaches to conceptualizing the learning and teaching of mathematical and science content along with some potential design principles for building reflective practices through qualitative video projects. © 2018 Association for Science Teacher Education.

We document evidence that firms systematically increase specialized, locally targeted advertising following the firm being taken to trial in that given location, precisely following initiation of the suit. In particular, we use legal actions brought against publicly traded firms over the 20-year sample period that progress to trial between 1995 and 2014. In terms of magnitude, the increase is sizable: targeted local advertising increases by 23% (t = 4.37) following the suit. They focus their advertisement spikes specifically toward jury trials, and in fact specifically toward the most likely jury pool. Last, we document that these advertising spikes are associated with verdicts, increasing the probability of a favorable outcome. This paper was accepted by Tomasz Piskorski, finance. Funding: We gratefully acknowledge funding from the National Science Foundation [Grant SciSIP-1535813]. Supplemental Material: The data files and online appendix are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2023.4896. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One line of research on student understanding of complex systems has tended to emphasize discontinuities between common misconceptions and relatively more sophisticated understandings. Other work has focused on instruction while acknowledging the existence of other ways of understanding complex systems, but less emphasis has been on examining the knowledge structures within these intermediate ways of understanding. This study takes a microgenetic approach to examining student's explanations for the behavior of complex systems. Using the Knowledge-in-Pieces epistemological perspective, the analysis documents a continuity of reasoning patterns across less prototypically centralized and more prototypically decentralized (a more sophisticated causality) explanations while explaining the movement of sand dunes. The first analysis examines 31 interviews and shows that many reflected a general reasoning pattern that encompassing some combination of an initial centralized explanation, a final decentralized explanation, and transitional explanations. A second analysis examines a single student's reasoning pattern and finds that the activation of relevant intuitive knowledge pieces (p-prims) and transitional explanations function as threads of continuity across the continuum of reasoning patterns. These findings suggest that students are able to exhibit a continuity of reasoning patterns across centralized to decentralized causality and are able to access productive intuitive knowledge about complex systems that are applicable to both the macro and micro levels of sand dune movement. Implications suggest that future research investigate these transitional explanations along with the mechanisms of shifting explanations that can account for this robust continuum.

Understanding the relationship between energy and temperature can be challenging, but it is crucial to developing an understanding of the underlying mechanism behind climate change. In this article, the authors review the development of a unit that focuses on the relationship between energy, greenhouse gases, aerosols (a suspension of fine solid particles or liquid droplets in air), and temperature through a model known as the Earth's Energy Budget, which tracks incoming and outgoing radiation, similar to a monetary budget. They implemented this unit in an Advanced Placement (AP) Environmental Science class, using the framing question: "Could aerosols worsen or improve what greenhouse gases are doing to our atmosphere?" By the end of the unit, the students knew why greenhouse gases and aerosols affect the climate and used this understanding to ask insightful questions that the authors hope will propel their intellectual curiosity.

This study investigates how preservice elementary teachers (PSTs) engage and reflect on two science disciplinary practices: engaging with representations and engaging in evidence-based arguments. In the context of elementary science, teachers blend multiple practices across curricular topics and instruction. However, studies of teachers' use of various practices often examine them independently. Contrastingly, here we examine the blending of these two practices with a focus on PSTs' myriad ways of sensemaking about these practices, referred to as knowledge resources. Data involve audio recordings of PSTs discussing arguments and representations while engaged in small group activities centered on carefully designed teaching cases where the PSTs were tasked to imagine that they are the teacher in an elementary classroom. Analyses reveal that the PSTs used a variety of knowledge resources for analyzing existing representations, generating new representations, and evaluating and generating both existing and new arguments. We also found that PSTs' knowledge resources about arguments and representations were brought together in two ways: generating arguments based on given representations to enhance their understanding and generating representations in response to student arguments to enhance student understanding. These findings are important for teacher education, how PSTs are taught to engage with these practices, and how they conceptualize different instructional strategies for supporting elementary students' understanding and use of these practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Important science phenomena--such as atomic structure, evolution, and climate change--are often hard to observe directly. That's why an important scientific practice is to use scientific models to represent one's current understanding of a system. Using models has been included as an essential science and engineering practice in the "Next Generation Science Standards" (NGSS Lead States 2013). This article describes an instructional unit that uses an iterative process of generating, critiquing, and revising complex scientific models that address sea level rise.

This article presents an empirical analysis of conceptual difficulties encountered and ways students made progress in learning at both individual and group levels in a classroom environment in which the students used an embodied modeling activity to make sense of a specific scientific scenario. The theoretical framework, coordination class theory, has primarily been used to capture individual learning in interview settings, and here it is applied to analytically capture both individual and group learning in a complex classroom environment. Classrooms of ninth-grade earth science students used the position of their bodies to model a specific scientific concept, the steady-state energy of the earth. The students encountered difficulties aligning their understanding of the scientific concept with the models. Subsequently, they changed their models in specific ways that better aligned their understanding of the scientific concept with their newly modified model. The theory is utilized to describe learning by both individuals and the group in this classroom environment and shows how a single student's contribution can dramatically affect the model and subsequent learning. Implications suggest new ways in which the theory may be useful for designing learning environments.

Many larger museums and archives have begun to implement a centralized approach to digitization of collections by creating Digitization Coordinator positions. This new effort has initiated a singular vision for digitization that incorporates priorities, workflows, and resources to greatly improve the efficiency and throughput of digitization in collections. Smaller institutions are now starting to see the benefit of creating a more structured cross-disciplinary approach to digitization, allowing for better awareness and resourcing of digitization needs. The workshop brought together natural sciences digitization professionals from the USA and EU, highlighting lessons learned and best practices to realize the benefits of a coordinated approach including advocacy for digitization, accelerating digitization efficiency and, ultimately, increasing digital collections access and usability to address societal challenges, such as biodiversity decline. Insights, lessons learned and initial thoughts on best practices are described, and the supporting workshop resources are shared so that others can benefit. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]