Children acquire gender stereotypes at a young age and these subsequently influence cognition and behavior. Stereotypes may be learned through a child's direct observation of gender differences as well as perpetuated by inaccurate cultural depictions. Children's mass media, a cultural product, may be a powerful source of gender stereotype…

Many nonprofit organizations rely upon volunteers and fundraising events to supplement their operating budgets. Unfortunately, these budgets are often so tight that they do not allow for supplemental purchases beyond daily operations. Many nonprofit organizations would love to have volunteer help who could create software to meet their specific…

Teaching socio-scientific issues (SSI) fosters students' ethical reasoning, yet many educators struggle with integrating these topics into science classrooms. This exploratory mixed-methods study investigates how ethical reflection influences adolescents' attitudes toward animal experimentation and their ethical orientations. The study involved 72…

This account of practice focuses on how an action learning methodology was used for a project in the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine (the Department) a large Irish Government Department with a workforce of approximately 4,000 staff. The objectives of the project were to explore the reasons for the low engagement of senior managers…

Recently it has been proposed that impairments related to autism spectrum disorder (ASD) may reflect a more fundamental disruption in time perception. Here, we examined whether in utero exposure to valproic acid (VPA) can generate specific behavioral deficits related to ASD and time perception. Pups from control and VPA groups were tested using…

As researchers, teachers, and practitioners we often encounter young professionals and lay adults who do not understand basics of mammalian body temperature regulation. Often their single solid piece of knowledge is that some vertebrates (mammals and birds) are warm-blooded and some (fish, amphibians, and reptile) are cold-blooded, which is…

In the last 5 years, the literature on animal-assisted intervention (AAI) for Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) has doubled in size from 42 studies prior to 2015 to 85 studies (cumulative total assessed in 2020). Horses remain the most commonly researched animal for AAI, followed by dogs. The most commonly researched outcome was social interaction,…

What would it be like to learn to live in and experience a world of sentient beings rather than inert objects? How can we learn to awarely participate in a world of communication and interaction, in which trees, crows and rivers may grace us with a response to our attention and our call? How do we learn not just to know this intellectually but…

The purpose of this systematic review was to synthesize the research literature on equine-assisted services for motor outcomes of autistic children. Eligible articles published between June 2012 and June 2023 were identified through electronic database searches, including PubMed, PsycINFO, CINAHL, and Web of Science. The Preferred Reporting Items…

In recent years, global concern has grown regarding the degradation of marine ecosystems. Humanity has greatly benefited from the oceans, underscoring the constant need for restoration and conservation of marine ecosystems. International cooperation is essential for protecting the oceans, with Japan, an island nation surrounded by the sea, playing…

Background/purpose: This study explores how animals associated with rivers and water are represented in Southern Vietnamese folk verses. It addresses the broader question of how language encodes cultural and ecological knowledge, focusing on cultural categorization as conceptualized in Cultural Linguistics. The research aims to uncover how the…

Some philosophers argue that reflection is key to rational thinking. By tying reflective thinking to language, they struggle to account for minimally verbal infants and exclude nonhuman animals. This study assessed processing of undermining defeaters--a basic form of reflective thinking--in 36 two-year-old British children (13 female; M[subscript…

Animal vocal behaviour represents a certain meaning, which is the explicit expression of animal emotions, needs and communication. Different from human language, animal vocal behaviour is very abstract, and the learning material of animal vocal behaviour is also more difficult to obtain. It is hard for college students to recognize vocal…

The dopamine system has been implicated in decision-making particularly when associated with effortful behavior. We examined acute optogenetic stimulation of dopamine cells in the ventral tegmental area (VTA) as mice engaged in an effort-based decision-making task. Tyrosine hydroxylase-Cre mice were injected with Cre-dependent ChR2 or eYFP control…

An understanding of how sensemaking unfolds when elementary students engage in engineering design tasks is crucial to advancing engineering teaching and learning at K-12 levels. Sensemaking has been widely studied in the context of science as a discipline. In this paper, we seek to contribute to the more nascent efforts to build theory about the…