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This article examines the negative effects social media has on adolescents' health and well-being, and how it impacts their academic life. Research was conducted by using scholarly search engines to locate several articles that examined the effects of social media use on adolescents within the last ten years. After reviewing the articles, five main themes emerged: social media's impact on (1) social-emotional health, (2) mental health, (3) physical health, (4) academic performance, and (5) the effect of social media use during the COVID-19 pandemic. The findings from the literature review show the adverse effects of social media on adolescent social-emotional, mental, and physical health, and student academic performance. This review of the literature concludes by observing that adolescents are struggling with problematic social media use and need to learn responsible self-regulation tools and strategies. Future research should consider how to effectively protect and limit students from having to experience these adverse effects, while promoting a healthy and responsible balance of life online and in-person.

The gut microbiome (GM) modulates body weight/composition and gastrointestinal functioning; therefore, approaches targeting resident gut microbes have attracted considerable interest. Intermittent fasting (IF) and protein pacing (P) regimens are effective in facilitating weight loss (WL) and enhancing body composition. However, the interrelationships between IF- and P-induced WL and the GM are unknown. The current randomized controlled study describes distinct fecal microbial and plasma metabolomic signatures between combined IF-P (n = 21) versus a heart-healthy, calorie-restricted (CR, n = 20) diet matched for overall energy intake in free-living human participants (women = 27; men = 14) with overweight/obesity for 8 weeks. Gut symptomatology improves and abundance of Christensenellaceae microbes and circulating cytokines and amino acid metabolites favoring fat oxidation increase with IF-P (p

While there currently exists a vast body of research around school turnaround policies, few studies speak to why they have or have not worked. This paper undertakes a systematic review of research literature on school turnaround policies to explore why this lack of understanding prevails in the field. We find key disconnects between "policy" and "practice" research on the topic of school turnaround. We contend that this divide negates the potential to learn from school leadership policy and practice in turnaround settings. We offer implications of these findings within turnaround research and policy while pointing out that this apparent divide seems to extend beyond the example of turnaround.

Picturebooks can broaden students' understanding of diverse experiences and perspectives, both within and beyond their own worlds; in addition, picturebooks can affirm students' identities (Botelho & Rudman, 2009) and create spaces for critical conversations. Using the theoretical framework for critical multicultural analysis, this qualitative case study investigated one avenue for integrating cultural diversity--themed texts into a kindergarten classroom with the usage of interactive read-aloud techniques. In the session described in this article, young children drew and wrote responses after engaging in an interactive read-aloud of "The Proudest Blue" (Muhammad & Ali, 2019) in their classroom. "The Proudest Blue" reflects the author's older sister's first day wearing a hijab at school but also shows how some children reflected xenophobic attitudes. The research question that focused the study was: How do kindergarteners conceptualize culture, gender, religion, or race through writing and drawing as they respond to an interactive read-aloud of "The Proudest Blue?" These results provide insight into how kindergarteners visually respond to interactive read-alouds when experiencing a book focused on cultural and religious diversity.

Land acknowledgments are one step that educators and institutions can take to begin realigning their relationship with Indigenous peoples. However, many fear doing more harm than good when taking the first step of doing a land acknowledgment. In this paper an instructor who overcame such hesitation and an Indigenous faculty member share a six item framework for land acknowledgments developed in collaboration with Indigenous students, colleagues, and community members that greatly increases the likelihood of doing good rather than harm when delivering a land acknowledgement. This article's unique contribution is its specific framework and step-by-step instructions for creating an appropriate and meaningful land acknowledgement, using an example crafted for the authors' institution to illustrate the process. It also suggests resources for learning about land acknowledgment that will be useful to people living on Indigenous lands around the world.

School leadership was transformed by the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States. In this crisis, principals organised schooling amidst extreme confusion and uncertainty. Using sensemaking theory to capture how leaders identified, interpreted, and acted on this novel situation, this longitudinal qualitative study describes how school leaders, in interaction with stakeholders, generated understanding during the pandemic. We draw particular attention to a set of actors -- parents -- who elevated their participation in education broadly and sensemaking specifically in ways that have yet to be explored in other educational research. We examine the active role parents played in shaping educational decisions, their interaction with school leadership, and the growing polarisation exacerbated by the deepening political crisis that frames the field of education more generally. Our findings highlight how school leaders and parents held competing beliefs about how schools should be organised, leading to a process of what we call "sensesplitting," the growth of two narratives emerging out of the same phenomena. This study offers important insight into how organisational sensemaking in education is increasingly shaped by parents, politics, and school leadership and the impact of this shift on leaders' decision-making.

Significant human gut microbiome changes during adolescence suggest that microbial community evolution occurs throughout important developmental periods including the transition to college, a typical life phase of weight gain. In this observational longitudinal study of 139 college freshmen living in on-campus dormitories, we tracked changes in the gut microbiome via 16S amplicon sequencing and body weight across a single academic year. Participants were grouped by weight change categories of gain (WG), loss (WL), and maintenance (WM). Upon assessment of the community structure, unweighted and weighted UniFrac metrics revealed significant shifts with substantial variation explained by individual effects within weight change categories. Genera that positively contributed to these associations with weight change included Bacteroides, Blautia, and Bifidobacterium in WG participants and Prevotella and Faecalibacterium in WL and WM participants. Moreover, the Prevotella/Bacteroides ratio was significantly different by weight change category, with WL participants displaying an increased ratio. Importantly, these genera did not display co-dominance nor ease of transition between Prevotella- and Bacteroides-dominated states. We further assessed the overall taxonomic variation, noting the increased stability of the WL compared to the WG microbiome. Finally, we found 30 latent community structures within the microbiome with significant associations with waist circumference, sleep, and dietary factors, with alcohol consumption chief among them. Our findings highlight the high level of individual variation and the importance of initial gut microbiome community structure in college students during a period of major lifestyle changes. Further work is needed to confirm these findings and explore mechanistic relationships between gut microbes and weight change in free-living individuals.

We report two new series of compounds that show the ferroelectric nematic, NF, phase in which the terminal chain length is varied. The longer the terminal chain, the weaker the dipole-dipole interactions of the molecules are along the director and thus the lower the temperature at which the axially polar NF phase is formed. For homologues of intermediate chain lengths, between the non-polar and ferroelectric nematic phases, a wide temperature range nematic phase emerges with antiferroelectric character. The size of the antiparallel ferroelectric domains critically increases upon transition to the NF phase. In dielectric studies, both collective ("ferroelectric") and non-collective fluctuations are present, and the "ferroelectric" mode softens weakly at the N-NX phase transition because the polar order in this phase is weak. The transition to the NF phase is characterized by a much stronger lowering of the mode relaxation frequency and an increase in its strength, and a typical critical behavior is observed.

In late 2013, under the leadership of Prime Minister Abbott, the Australian Government announced a new policy designed to increase attendance rates in remote community schools--the Remote School Attendance Strategy (RSAS). The model assumed that employing local people in the program, which was designed to support parents get their children to school, would yield significant improvements and consequently improve educational outcomes. After a slight initial increase in school attendance rates, RSAS schools have seen average attendance rates decline since 2016, which now stand more than eight percentage points lower than at commencement. This article analyses My School data for Very Remote Aboriginal schools, showing how the RSAS school attendance results compare with similar non-RSAS schools. We question why the Australian Government continues to invest in a program that is not meeting its objectives, asking, what went wrong?. We do this by critically analysing 36 policy-related documents, looking for ideological clues that show why the government continues to invest in the program and how it sees it as "successful". We conclude by raising ethical and accountability concerns about the RSAS, which lacks evidence of attendance improvement, and which potentially causes harm to its objects: First Nations students.

Educational experts advocate for storytelling's community building aspects; it is also a valuable tool for deepening students' cognitive engagement. Indigenous pedagogy has long emphasized the centrality of storytelling to knowledge production and transmission (Neeganagwedgin, 2020). This article offers a case study analyzing an upper-division undergraduate health policy course transformation to foreground storytelling in a synchronous online format. Consistent with the "watch one, do one, teach one" model, students heard narrative descriptions of guest storytellers' policy experiences, constructed narrative stories describing a population health problem in written assignments, and shared a policy proposal story about why policy matters and how it can be changed to improve population health. This approach improved student engagement, fostered knowledge creation, and -- despite the distance inherent in online education -- improved students' sense of self-efficacy and membership in a professional community. The article concludes with recommendations for integrating storytelling into other disciplines and modalities.

The outbreak of COVID-19 and the lockdown measures that were widely implemented in response to the pandemic forced many of the forms of engagement and activities promoted by student affairs and services staff among students at universities to be curtailed or transformed -- at first, so that they entailed no interpersonal contact and later so that they took place in line with health and safety protocols restricting contact. The moment of crisis required decisive, innovative leadership from members of staff as they sought to help meet the needs of students who were now deprived of the benefits of the psycho-social, intellectual and physical engagements that had been provided by in-person contact on highly interactive campuses. Accordingly, the student affairs and services staff at North-West University in South Africa collaborated with students, leveraging their creative potential to reach out, create and implement new student support systems and programmes through structured activities that could take place online and in the form of strictly controlled contact sessions. In this context, two new initiatives were established at the university: a student behaviour project which sought to deploy student peers to promote adherence to COVID-19 occupational health and safety protocols among the student population; and a raft of psycho-social support interventions, including webinars, cultural and sporting activities, and residence activities which promoted student welfare including by helping students to manage the realities of the pandemic more effectively. This reflective article, authored by two of the North-West University student affairs and services staff responsible for launching and leading these initiatives, considers the kinds of collaboration among university staff and with students that informed the establishment and implementation of these projects. Focusing particularly on how these projects may have contributed towards increased levels of social capital among the students at the university at a moment of crisis, with a view to extract lessons that may be learned for the proactive development of student-support measures under similar conditions in future.

This paper seeks to explore how rural Latinx students' STEM identity development can be fostered by utilizing their cultural capital. By both a community cultural wealth and science identity model, this paper reviews previous literature to conceptualize how and why rural Latinx youth are continuously underrepresented within STEM education and future career pathways. When forming STEM identities and aspirations for the future, Latinx students draw from six forms of capital- "aspirational," "linguistic," "familial," "social," "navigational," and "resistant." Throughout this paper, we discuss each of these six forms of capital wealth and the value rural Latinx students can bring into STEM educational spaces. Supporting rural Latinx students' STEM identity development is a vital key to the disruption of systemic inequalities that perpetuate societal and institutional spaces. Conclusions drawn from the literature showcase how cultural wealth sustains the development of Latinx students' STEM identities. Future considerations need to focus on the STEM disparities that still exist for this population of students, specifically those in rural communities.

PurposeGenomic alterations of BRAF and NRAS are oncogenic drivers in malignant melanoma and other solid tumors. Tovorafenib is an investigational, oral, selective, CNS-penetrant, small molecule, type II pan‑RAF inhibitor. This first-in-human phase 1 study explored the safety and antitumor activity of tovorafenib.MethodsThis two-part study in adult patients with relapsed or refractory advanced solid tumors included a dose escalation phase and a dose expansion phase including molecularly defined cohorts of patients with melanoma. Primary objectives were to evaluate the safety of tovorafenib administered once every other day (Q2D) or once weekly (QW), and to determine the maximum-tolerated and recommended phase 2 dose (RP2D) on these schedules. Secondary objectives included evaluation of antitumor activity and tovorafenib pharmacokinetics.ResultsTovorafenib was administered to 149 patients (Q2D n = 110, QW n = 39). The RP2D of tovorafenib was defined as 200 mg Q2D or 600 mg QW. In the dose expansion phase, 58 (73%) of 80 patients in Q2D cohorts and 9 (47%) of 19 in the QW cohort had grade ≥ 3 adverse events. The most common of these overall were anemia (14 patients, 14%) and maculo-papular rash (8 patients, 8%). Responses were seen in 10 (15%) of 68 evaluable patients in the Q2D expansion phase, including in 8 of 16 (50%) patients with BRAF mutation-positive melanoma naïve to RAF and MEK inhibitors. In the QW dose expansion phase, there were no responses in 17 evaluable patients with NRAS mutation-positive melanoma naïve to RAF and MEK inhibitors; 9 patients (53%) had a best response of stable disease. QW dose administration was associated with minimal accumulation of tovorafenib in systemic circulation in the dose range of 400-800 mg.ConclusionsThe safety profile of both schedules was acceptable, with QW dosing at the RP2D of 600 mg QW preferred for future clinical studies. Antitumor activity of tovorafenib in BRAF-mutated melanoma was promising and justifies continued clinical development across multiple settings.ClinicaltrialsGov identifierNCT01425008.

Crisis events external to schools can present challenges for teaching and learning, and the ways that school leaders respond to these challenges both immediately and over time can have implications that extend beyond the crisis itself. Drawing on responsible leadership theory (Maak, 2007; Maak & Pless, 2006; Pless, 2007; Pless & Maak, 2011), our qualitative interview study with 26 elementary school principals in 14 states explores how school leaders facilitate learning in a time of crisis. We find that leaders who built and sustained relationships both within their immediate community of stakeholders and beyond with the local district and networks of principal peers ultimately addressed the immediate needs of students as well as created the conditions to support these needs over time. These positive changes impacted all students, but specifically benefitted the schools' most vulnerable learners, including students receiving special education and English language service. These findings draw attention to the importance of understanding the role that responsible leadership plays in school crisis leadership, specifically the necessity of weaving and brokering relationships that help leaders achieve not only their school-level goals but societal goals, including more equitable learning outcomes, while highlighting the implications of what we identify as role expansion for school leaders.

Aims: Though best known for its role in oxidative DNA damage repair, apurinic/apyrimidinic endonuclease 1 (APE1) is a multifunctional protein that regulates multiple host responses during oxidative stress, including the reductive activation of transcription factors. As knockout of the APE1-encoding gene, Apex1, is embryonically lethal, we sought to create a viable model with generalized inhibition of APE1 expression. Results: A hypomorphic (HM) mouse with decreased APE1 expression throughout the body was generated using a construct containing a neomycin resistance (NeoR) cassette knocked into the Apex1 site. Offspring were assessed for APE1 expression, breeding efficiency, and morphology with a focused examination of DNA damage in the stomach. Heterozygotic breeding pairs yielded 50% fewer HM mice than predicted by Mendelian genetics. APE1 expression was reduced up to 90% in the lungs, heart, stomach, and spleen. The HM offspring were typically smaller, and most had a malformed tail. Oxidative DNA damage was increased spontaneously in the stomachs of HM mice. Further, all changes were reversed when the NeoR cassette was removed. Primary gastric epithelial cells from HM mice differentiated more quickly and had more evidence of oxidative DNA damage after stimulation with Helicobacter pylori or a chemical carcinogen than control lines from wildtype mice. Innovation: A HM mouse with decreased APE1 expression throughout the body was generated and extensively characterized. Conclusion: The results suggest that HM mice enable studies of APE1's multiple functions throughout the body. The detailed characterization of the stomach showed that gastric epithelial cells from HM were more susceptible to DNA damage. Antioxid. Redox Signal. 38, 183-197.

High-impact educational practices, including team-based learning (TBL) and the use of ePortfolio technology, have been demonstrated to support student learning. This project used a mixed-methods, pre- and post-semester design to examine the combined effect of TBL and the use of team ePortfolios as collaborative workspaces in an upper-division, undergraduate Health Education: Theory and Practice course. Quantitative findings show that students experienced statistically significant increases in their health education competencies and confidence working as health educators, over the course of the semester. Qualitative findings illustrate that students found TBL and the use of a well-integrated ePortfolio effective in supporting their skill development as members of collaborative teams and future health educators. Together, these findings suggest that ePortfolios can be effectively used to create shared online workspaces, support TBL, and develop students' skills in many disciplines.

This paper describes a framework for educating future evaluators and users of evaluation through community-engaged, experiential learning courses and offers practical guidance about how such a class can be structured. This approach is illustrated via a reflective case narrative describing how an introductory, undergraduate class at a mid-size, public university in the northwest partnered with a community agency. In the class, students learned and practiced evaluation principles in the context of a Parents as Teachers home visiting program, actively engaged in course assignments designed to support the program's evaluation needs, and presented meta-evaluative findings and recommendations for future evaluation work to the community partner to conclude the semester. This community-engaged approach to teaching evaluation anchors student learning in an applied context, promotes social engagement, and enables students to contribute to knowledge about effective human action, as outlined in the American Evaluation Association's Mission.