Evidence-based teaching practices correlate with increased exam performance in biology

Evidence-based teaching practices are associated with improved student academic performance. However, these practices encompass a wide range of activities and determining which type, intensity or duration of activity is effective at improving student exam performance has been elusive. To address this shortcoming, we used a previously validated classroom observation tool, Practical Observation Rubric to Assess Active Learning (PORTAAL) to measure the presence, intensity, and duration of evidence-based teaching practices in a retrospective study of upper and lower division biology courses. We determined the cognitive challenge of exams by categorizing all exam questions obtained from the courses using Bloom’s Taxonomy of Cognitive Domains. We used structural equation modeling to correlate the PORTAAL practices with exam performance while controlling for cognitive challenge of exams, students’ GPA at start of the term, and students’ demographic factors. Small group activities, randomly calling on students or groups to answer questions, explaining alternative answers, and total time students were thinking, working with others or answering questions had positive correlations with exam performance. On exams at higher Bloom’s levels, students explaining the reasoning underlying their answers, students working alone, and receiving positive feedback from the instructor also correlated with increased exam performance. Our study is the first to demonstrate a correlation between the intensity or duration of evidence-based PORTAAL practices and student exam performance while controlling for Bloom’s level of exams, as well as looking more specifically at which practices correlate with performance on exams at low and high Bloom’s levels. This level of detail will provide valuable insights for faculty as they prioritize changes to their teaching. As we found that multiple PORTAAL practices had a positive association with exam performance, it may be encouraging for instructors to realize that there are many ways to benefit students’ learning by incorporating these evidence-based teaching practices.

A Tale of Sound and Fury Signifying Everything: Argentine Tango Dance Films as Complex Self-Reflexive Creation

This article equates the multidimensional artistic form of Argentine tango (dance, music and song) with the innately hybrid form of film. It compares Argentine tango culture to the height of French cinephilia in the 1950s Paris, France, arguing that they are both passionate, erotic and nostalgic ways of life. In Carlos Saura’s Tango (1998) and Sally Potter’s The Tango Lesson (1997), the intertwining of the related skills of tango practice and filmmaking are an audio-visual treat for the senses and a cognitive challenge for the mind. Their self-reflexivity promotes excess and the result is a highly expressive and complex form. They evince a cross-fertilization of reality and fiction, of art and life, typical of a perfect mise en abyme as described by Christian Metz. These films are also art musicals, although they depart from the Hollywood musical conventions. Yet, one cannot speak in their case of intermedia reflexivity, according to Petr Szczepanik’s definition, because both of them retain their qualities in a symbiotic relationship of likeness that highlights their mutual aura.

Analysing Probability Teaching Practices in Primary Education: What Tasks Do Teachers Implement?

This study analyses probability tasks proposed by primary education teachers to promote probabilistic literacy. To this end, eight class sessions at various levels of the Chilean educational system were recorded on video and analysed through the ”probability tasks” dimension from the “Observation Instrument for Probability Classes” (IOC-PROB), which includes five components: use of resources, probabilistic contexts, cognitive challenge, procedures and strategies, and probability meanings. The results show that probability tasks focus mainly on technical knowledge, causing the probability class to become an arithmetic class in which only formulas are applied, mechanically and with no meaning. As a result, we see no use of technological resources, a low use of physical materials, and an absolute predominance of solving decontextualised exercises. We conclude that it is necessary to enhance the probability teaching practices based on lesson plans that consider a wide variety of resources and contexts to gradually advance towards a representation of probabilistic knowledge that relies on conventional procedures and notations.

The Puzzle Challenge Analysis Tool. A Tool for Analysing the Cognitive Challenge Level of Puzzles in Video Games

Video games are often designed around puzzles and problem-solving, leading to challenging yet engaging experiences for players. However, it is hard to measure or compare the challenge level of puzzles in video games. This can make designing appropriately challenging puzzles problematic. This study collates previous work to present refined definitions for challenge and difficulty within the context of video games. We present the Puzzle Challenge Analysis tool which can be used to determine the best metrics for analysing the challenge level of puzzles within video games. Previous research has focused on measuring the difficulty of simple action video games, such as Pac-Man, which can be easily modified for research purposes. Existing methods to measure challenge or difficulty include measuring player brain activity, examining game features and player scores. However, some of these approaches cannot be applied to puzzles or puzzle games. For example, approaches relying on game scores will not work for puzzle games with no scoring system, where puzzles are either solved or not. This paper describes the design and development of the Puzzle Challenge Analysis tool using two case studies of commercial video games The Witness and Untitled Goose Game. The tool is also tested for generalisability on a third commercial puzzle video game, Baba Is You. This proposed tool can help game designers and researchers to objectively analyse and compare puzzle challenge and produce more in-depth insights into the player experience. This has implications for designing challenging and engaging games for a range of player abilities.

Occupational Depression, Cognitive Performance, and Task Appreciation: A Study Based on Raven’s Advanced Progressive Matrices

The Occupational Depression Inventory (ODI) was recently developed to assess depressive symptoms that individuals specifically attribute to their work. Research on the criterion validity of the instrument is still in its infancy. In this study, we examined whether the ODI predicted performance on, and appreciation of, a cognitively challenging test. In light of the link established between clinical depression and neuropsychological impairment, and considering that individuals with depressive symptoms are more likely to feel helpless under challenging circumstances, we hypothesized that occupational depression would be associated with poorer cognitive performance and a darkened appreciation of the task undertaken. We relied on a sample of 1,359 educational staff members. We used an abridged version of Raven’s Advanced Progressive Matrices (RAPMs) as a cognitively challenging task and measure of cognitive performance. RAPMs assess so-called eductive ability (meaning-making and problem-solving abilities) through items of various degrees of difficulty. Transient mood was assessed with a three-item measure before RAPMs were administered. Task appreciation was assessed with a single-item measure after the completion of RAPMs. We found occupational depression to be negatively linked to cognitive performance. A two-step cluster analysis, in which ODI and RAPMs scores were used as classifiers, revealed two profiles of respondents. The first profile was characterized by relatively low levels of depressive symptoms and high levels of cognitive performance; the second profile, by relatively high levels of depressive symptoms and low levels of cognitive performance. The two profiles differed strongly from one another, as indexed by Cohen’s ds of 2.492 regarding depressive symptoms and 1.263 regarding cognitive performance. As anticipated, occupational depression predicted a darkened appreciation of the test. The association remained statistically significant, and largely unchanged, controlling for pretest mood and test performance. The highest levels of depressive symptoms were observed among individuals evaluating the task as “frustrating” and “discouraging.” Our study suggests that occupational depression predicts poorer cognitive performance and a negativized experience of cognitive challenge. Such features may be part of a self-sustaining loop fostering the maintenance of depressive symptoms. The extent to which the ODI predicts performance in the work context needs to be investigated.

Development of strategic social information seeking: Implications for cumulative culture

Human learners are rarely the passive recipients of valuable social information. Rather, learners usually have to actively seek out information from a variety of potential others to determine who is in a position to provide useful information. Yet, the majority of developmental social learning paradigms do not address participants’ ability to seek out information for themselves. To investigate age-related changes in children’s ability to seek out appropriate social information, 3- to 8-year-olds (N = 218) were presented with a task requiring them to identify which of four possible demonstrators could provide critical information for unlocking a box. Appropriate information seeking improved significantly with age. The particularly high performance of 7- and 8-year-olds was consistent with the expectation that older children’s increased metacognitive understanding would allow them to identify appropriate information sources. Appropriate social information seeking may have been overlooked as a significant cognitive challenge involved in fully benefiting from others’ knowledge, potentially influencing understanding of the phylogenetic distribution of cumulative culture.

Efficiency in discourse processing: Does morphosyntax adapt to accommodate new referents?

The introduction of new referents into discourse has traditionally been regarded as a major challenge to language processing, for which speakers deploy specific syntactic configurations, guided by the speaker’s assessment of the recipient’s state of mind (‘recipient design’). In this paper we probe these assumptions against discourse data from nine languages. We find little evidence for specialized syntactic configurations accommodating new referents; the only notable exception is the association of new reference with direct objects, suggests that linking new referents to already established discourse frames through a transitive construction is preferable to isolating them in an intransitive one. Where specific intransitive predicates are indeed found to host new referents, we find this to be motivated primarily by semantic considerations. Contrary to long-held assumptions, we conclude that the cognitive challenge of referent introduction is only weakly reflected in morphosyntax; instead, discourse production is most efficient when new referents are integrated seamlessly with content-driven demands of the narration.

Investigating Therapies for Freezing of Gait Targeting the Cognitive, Limbic, and Sensorimotor Domains

Background Freezing of gait (FOG) is arguably the most disabling motor symptom experienced with Parkinson’s disease (PD), but treatments are extremely limited due to our poor understanding of the underlying mechanisms. Three cortical domains are postulated in recent research (ie, the cognitive, limbic, and sensorimotor domains), thus, treatments targeting these mechanisms of FOG may potentially be effective. Cognitive training, cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT, a well-known anxiety intervention), and proprioceptive training may address the cognitive, limbic, and sensorimotor domains, respectively. Objective To investigate whether these 3 treatments could improve functional outcomes of FOG. Methods In a single-blind, randomized crossover design, 15 individuals with PD and FOG were randomized into different, counterbalanced orders of receiving the interventions. Each consisted of eight 1-hour sessions, twice weekly for 4 weeks. FOG severity was assessed as the primary outcome using a novel gait paradigm that was aimed at evoking FOG when the cognitive, limbic, or sensorimotor domains were independently challenged. Results FOG severity significantly improved after the cognitive intervention, with strong trends toward improvement specifically in the baseline and cognitive-challenge assessment conditions. CBT, as the anxiety intervention, resulted in significantly worse FOG severity. In contrast, proprioceptive training significantly improved FOG severity, with consistent trends across all conditions. Conclusions The cognitive and proprioceptive treatments appeared to improve different aspects of FOG. Thus, either of these interventions could potentially be a viable treatment for FOG. However, although the results were statistically significant, they could be sensitive to the relatively small number of participants in the study. Considering the significant results together with nonsignificant trends in both FOG and gait measures, and given equal time for each intervention, proprioceptive training produced the most consistent indications of benefits in this study. (clinicaltrials.gov NCT03065127).

Hippocampal neurons respond to brain activity with functional hypoxia

Physical activity and cognitive challenge are established non-invasive methods to induce comprehensive brain activation and thereby improve global brain function including mood and emotional well-being in healthy subjects and in patients. However, the mechanisms underlying this experimental and clinical observation and broadly exploited therapeutic tool are still widely obscure. Here we show in the behaving brain that physiological (endogenous) hypoxia is likely a respective lead mechanism, regulating hippocampal plasticity via adaptive gene expression. A refined transgenic approach in mice, utilizing the oxygen-dependent degradation (ODD) domain of HIF-1α fused to CreERT2 recombinase, allows us to demonstrate hypoxic cells in the performing brain under normoxia and motor-cognitive challenge, and spatially map them by light-sheet microscopy, all in comparison to inspiratory hypoxia as strong positive control. We report that a complex motor-cognitive challenge causes hypoxia across essentially all brain areas, with hypoxic neurons particularly abundant in the hippocampus. These data suggest an intriguing model of neuroplasticity, in which a specific task-associated neuronal activity triggers mild hypoxia as a local neuron-specific as well as a brain-wide response, comprising indirectly activated neurons and non-neuronal cells.