Communicating and enhancing teachers' attitudes and understanding of influenza using refutational text.

Influenza is an important public health issue and schools play an important part in preventing influenza outbreaks. However, little is known about teachers' knowledge and attitudes toward influenza and vaccination. The purposes of this project were to assess preservice and early career teachers' knowledge and attitudes of influenza, evaluate the effectiveness of a refutational text on increasing teachers' attitudes towards and knowledge of influenza and vaccination, and evaluate the effects of participant epistemology, motivation, and cognitive engagement on influenza attitudes and knowledge.

Impact evaluation of Enabling Mothers to Prevent Pediatric Obesity through Web-Based Education and Reciprocal Determinism (EMPOWER) Randomized Control Trial.

Background: The family and home environment is an influential antecedent of childhood obesity. The purpose of this study was to pilot test The Enabling Mothers to Prevent Pediatric Obesity through Web-Based Education and Reciprocal Determinism (EMPOWER) intervention; a newly developed, theory-based, online program for prevention of childhood obesity.

Method: The two-arm, parallel group, randomized, participant-blinded trial targeted mothers with children between 4 and 6 years of age.

The sentence-composition effect: processing of complex sentences depends on the configuration of common noun phrases versus unusual noun phrases.

In 2 experiments, the authors used an eye tracking while reading methodology to examine how different configurations of common noun phrases versus unusual noun phrases (NPs) influenced the difference in processing difficulty between sentences containing object- and subject-extracted relative clauses. Results showed that processing difficulty was reduced when the head NP was unusual relative to the embedded NP, as manipulated by lexical frequency. When both NPs were common or both were unusual, results showed strong effects of both commonness and sentence structure, but no interaction.