Purpose: Social exclusion is a complicated psychological phenomenon with behavioral ramifications that influences consumers' lifestyles and behaviors. In contrast, anthropomorphism is a phenomenon that marketing strategists employ and that occurs in customers' lives as a result of social isolation. The literature discusses these two complicated…

Regular physical activity and balanced nutrition are important in maintaining a healthy weight. Nonetheless, minority populations, like Hispanics, face challenges (e.g., language barriers and transportation unavailability) that limit their participation in intervention programs to receive benefits. Furthermore, dog companionship has been shown to…

This article bewilders dominant discourses about child-animal relations by acknowledging and challenging the work of Gail Melson who positions animals as providing emotional, social and pedagogical support for children. Melson's psychological approach rests upon implicit assumptions that shape and support anthropocentrism whilst also critiquing a…

Whereas previous studies show that children are able to make meaning about evolutionary concepts within read-aloud contexts, little is known about how semiotic resources and interaction influence children's meaning making about evolution. This study investigates children's meaning making about evolutionary concepts during a modelling activity…

Because of their mostly upbeat everyday presence in most people's lives globally, Internet memes have gained attention as tools in spreading information and enacting attitudinal change in the face of environmental troubles. The reappropriation of memes for classroom purposes is not straightforward, however. We focus our exploration of Internet…

Ongoing management and research interest in dog-related issues at recreation areas necessitates examining support for relevant management strategies among different visitor groups. Using data collected from an onsite survey of nonadjacent visitors (n=1,257) and a household mail survey of visitors who live adjacent (n=74) to a multiple-use…

Evolution is foundational to understanding biology, yet learners at all stages have incomplete and incorrect ideas that persist beyond graduation. Contextual features of prompts (e.g., taxon of organism, acquisition vs. loss of traits, etc.) have been shown to influence both the learning process and the ideas students express in explanations of…

Children's experiences of animal fears can be caused by direct conditioning, experiencing negative events, or modeling others' fears or situations. The fear of an animal that develops in a child as a result of various experiences may turn into an animal phobia over time. This study aims to examine the effectiveness of EMDR interventions for two…

Students are required to develop essential 21st-century skills, such as critical thinking and biological literacy, to effectively navigate challenges in the globalization era. It is known that the results of PISA 2022 and several studies show that these skills in students are still very low. However, traditional learning models often fail to…

The analysis of students' conceptions is a crucial element in modern science education research. Based on a large number of studies, we know that learning environments should build upon students' existing knowledge to initiate conceptual change towards an adequate scientific understanding. This also holds true when it comes to moral reasoning. In…

The California Blackworm ("Lumbriculus variegatus") is a freshwater segmented worm species that has been used by biology instructors as a model system for inquiry-based student investigations. The blackworm dorsal blood vessel pulsation rate is easily quantified. Moreover, this species can facilitate the study of neuromuscular…

In certain domains, people represent some of an individual's properties (e.g., a tiger's ferocity), but not others (e.g., a tiger's being in the zoo), as stemming from the assumed "essence" of the individual's category. How do children identify which properties of an individual are essentialized and which are not? Here, we examine…

We observed differences in cognitive functions between middle-aged female and male Wistar rats. Both (like youngsters) discriminated new versus familiar objects, showing similar short- and long-term memory (STM and LTM, respectively). Only females show robust LTM for new location of an object. Both successfully form LTM of inhibitory avoidance,…

Since the early 1990s the number of systematic reviews (SR) of animal studies has steadily increased. There is, however, little guidance on when and how to conduct a meta-analysis of human-health-related animal studies. To gain insight about the methods that are currently used we created an overview of the key characteristics of published…

This paper is a search for common ground between two natural scientists, two childhood studies and education scholars and two human-animal studies or critical animal studies scholars all working within a shared citizen science project. The search takes the form of a thematic mapping of existing literature on ecological citizen science, with two…