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BackgroundExisting screening tools for mental health issues among postsecondary students have several challenges, including a lack of standardization and codevelopment by students. HEARTSMAP-U was adapted to address these issues. ObjectiveThis study aimed to evaluate the suitability of HEARTSMAP-U as a self-screening tool for psychosocial issues among postsecondary students by evaluating its validity evidence and clinical utility. MethodsA prospective cohort study was conducted with University of British Columbia Vancouver students to evaluate HEARTSMAP-U’s predictive validity and convergent validity. Participating students completed baseline and 3-month follow-up assessments via HEARTSMAP-U and a clinician-administered interview. ResultsIn a diverse student sample (n=100), HEARTSMAP-U demonstrated high sensitivity (95%-100%) in identifying any psychiatric concerns that were flagged by a research clinician, with lower specificity (21%-25%). Strong convergent validity (r=0.54-0.68) was demonstrated when relevant domains and sections of HEARTSMAP-U were compared with those of other conceptually similar instruments. ConclusionsThis preliminary evaluation suggests that HEARTSMAP-U may be suitable for screening in the postsecondary educational setting. However, a larger-scale evaluation is necessary to confirm and expand on these findings.

BackgroundMental health challenges are highly prevalent in the post-secondary educational setting. Screening instruments have been shown to improve early detection and intervention. However, these tools often focus on specific diagnosable conditions, are not always designed with students in mind, and lack resource navigational support.ObjectiveThe aim of this study was to describe the adaptation of existing psychosocial assessment (HEARTSMAP) tools into a version that is fit-for-purpose for post-secondary students, called HEARTSMAP-U.MethodsWe underwent a three-phase, multi-method tool adaptation process. First, a diverse study team proposed a preliminary version of HEARTSMAP-U and its conceptual framework. Second, we conducted a cross-sectional expert review study with Canadian mental health professionals (N = 28), to evaluate the clinical validity of tool content. Third, we conducted an iterative series of six focus groups with diverse post-secondary students (N = 54), to refine tool content and language, and ensure comprehensibility and relevance to end-users.ResultsThe adaptation process resulted in the HEARTSMAP-U self-assessment and resource navigational support tool, which evaluates psychosocial challenges across 10 sections. In Phase two, clinician experts expressed that HEARTSMAP-U's content aligned with their own professional experiences working with students. In Phase three, students identified multiple opportunities to improve the tool's end-user relevance by calling for more “common language,” such as including examples, definitions, and avoiding technical jargon.ConclusionsThe HEARTSMAP-U tool is well-positioned for further studies of its quantitative psychometric properties and clinical utility in the post-secondary educational setting.

Abstract Considering how spatial thinking connects to Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) outcomes, recent studies have evaluated how spatial interventions impact elementary students’ math learning. While promising, these interventions tend to overlook other factors affecting math learning; perceptions of math abilities, beliefs about math, and math anxiety can also impact math performance. Additionally, perceptions of spatial skill and spatial anxiety impact spatial performance. This study investigated how elementary teachers’ perceptions of spatial thinking connects with math perceptions. Specifically, we focused on teachers’ attitudes and beliefs around three topics: teaching and learning math, spatial abilities, and spatial thinking in mathematics. We found that lower spatial anxiety related to lower anxiety about teaching math, greater alignment between math beliefs and math standards, and greater efficacy in teaching and learning math. Further, a factor analysis showed one factor that connected stereotypical math thinking with both math and spatial anxiety, and another that connected spatial competencies, teaching and learning math, and spatial thinking within math. To further evaluate spatial thinking in math, we introduced a math categorization and verified it using teachers’ ratings of teaching difficulty, visualization helpfulness, and spatial-thinking involvement. Structural equation models revealed that the level of spatial-thinking categorization was the best model of all three of the teachers’ ratings. Overall, results showed numerous connections between teachers’ attitudes and beliefs about mathematics and spatial thinking. Future intervention studies should consider teachers who are spatial and/or math-anxious, and future research should investigate the role of stereotypical thinking in spatial and math anxiety.

Socially accountable health curricula, designed to decrease Aboriginal health inequities through the transformation of health professional students into culturally safe practitioners, has become a focal point for health professional programmes. Despite this inclusion in health curricula there remains the question of how to best assess students in this area in relation to the concept, of cultural safety and transformative unlearning, to facilitate attitudinal change. To address this question, this study developed a research questionnaire to measure thematic areas of transformative unlearning, cultural safety and critical thinking in Aboriginal Health for application on undergraduate and postgraduate students and faculty staff. The Likert-scale questionnaire was developed and validated through face and content validity. Test–retest methodology was utilised to determine stability and reliability of the questionnaire with 40 participants. The extent of agreement and reliability were determined through weighted kappa and intraclass correlation coefficient. Exploratory factor analysis was calculated to determine construct validity for questionnaire items. For the overall population subset the tool met good standards of reliability and validity, with 11 of the 15 items reaching moderate agreement (κ > 0.6) and an intraclass correlation coefficient of 0.72, suggesting substantial agreement. Cronbach's alpha was calculated above 0.7 for the thematic areas. The majority of items provided high factor loadings, low loading items will be reviewed to strengthen the tool, where validations of the revised tool with a larger cohort will allow future use to compare and determine effective teaching methodologies in Aboriginal health and cultural safety curricula.

Individuals differ greatly in their ability to learn and navigate through environments. One potential source of this variation is “directional sense” or the ability to identify, maintain, and compare allocentric headings. Allocentric headings are facing directions that are fixed to the external environment, such as cardinal directions. Measures of the ability to identify and compare allocentric headings, using photographs of familiar environments, have shown significant individual and strategy differences; however, the neural basis of these differences is unclear. Forty-five college students, who were highly familiar with a campus environment and ranged in self-reported sense-of-direction, underwent fMRI scans while they completed the Relative Heading task, in which they had to indicate the direction of a series of photographs of recognizable campus buildings (i.e., “target headings”) with respect to initial “orienting headings.” Large individual differences were found in accuracy and correct decision latencies, with gender, self-reported sense-of-direction, and familiarity with campus buildings all predicting task performance. Using linear mixed models, the directional relationships between headings and the experiment location also impacted performance. Structural scans revealed that lateral orbitofrontal and superior parietal volume were related to task accuracy and decision latency, respectively. Bilateral hippocampus and right presubiculum volume were related to self-reported sense-of-direction. Meanwhile, functional results revealed clusters within the superior parietal lobule, supramarginal gyrus, superior frontal gyrus, lateral orbitofrontal cortex, and caudate among others in which the intensity of activation matched the linear magnitude of the difference between the orienting and target headings. While the retrosplenial cortex and hippocampus have previously been implicated in the coding of allocentric headings, this work revealed that comparing those headings additionally involved frontal and parietal regions. These results provide insights into the neural bases of the variation within human orientation abilities, and ultimately, human navigation.

Like most physical maps, recent research has suggested that cognitive maps of familiar environments may have a north-up orientation. We demonstrate that north orientation is not a necessary feature of cognitive maps and instead may arise due to coincidental alignment between cardinal directions and the built and natural environment. Experiment 1 demonstrated that pedestrians have difficulty pointing north while navigating a familiar real-world environment with roads, buildings, and green spaces oriented oblique to cardinal axes. Instead, north estimates tended to be parallel or perpendicular to roads. In Experiment 2, participants did not demonstrate privileged memory access when oriented toward north while making relative direction judgments. Instead, retrieval was fastest and most accurate when orientations were aligned with roads. In sum, cognitive maps are not always oriented north. Rather, in some real-world environments they can be oriented with respect to environment-specific features, serving as convenient reference systems for organizing and using spatial memory.