Introducing Interdisciplinary Curricula Into Conservation Biology: Exploring Changes in Students’ Perceived Proenvironmental Attitudes and Behaviors

Today, conserving the natural environment is paramount. Educators have been striving to develop pedagogical approaches that facilitate greater engagement in conservation behaviors. However, many of these reforms have been targeted at an institutional level, without necessarily testing whether changes in proenvironmental perceptions, attitudes, or behaviors occur for students. This step seems important when developing conservation biology courses that provide well-rounded education that may better prepare students for future challenges in biodiverse conservation contexts. Our objective was to assess the proenvironmental attitudes and conservation values of undergraduate students enrolled in an undergraduate conservation biology course before and after instruction to determine whether a multidisciplinary curriculum, in conjunction with traditional conservation biology content, would alter their perceptions. Students in both the control and intervention groups felt relatively neutral about a range of environmental and conservation topics. No statistical significance between curricula and impact on student perception was revealed. However, in the experimental course, shifts were found concerning students’ understanding of the complexity of conservation. Results also highlight long-standing issues related to conservation education, such as a bias toward mammal conservation, and suggest that guest lectures are insufficient to bring about attitude change related to sustainability. Further research on incorporating cross-disciplinary pedagogy into STEM courses is recommended

Spatial Training and Calculus Ability: Investigating Impacts on Student Performance and Cognitive Style

Undergraduate calculus is a foundational mathematics sequence that previews the sophistication students will need to succeed in higher-level courses. However, students often struggle with concepts in calculus because they are more abstract and visual than those in other foundational mathematics courses. Additionally, women continue to be underrepresented in the STEM fields. This study builds on previous work indicating a malleability in spatial ability by testing whether improvement occurs in students’ spatial and mathematics ability after implementing spatial training in calculus courses. The researchers also measured associations between spatial training and self-reported cognitive style. While spatial training did not significantly improve calculus and spatial skills, the researchers measured impacts on the psychological correlate of cognitive learning style. This is important as non-spatial cognitive preferences can result in students not recognizing the dynamic information encapsulated in graphical images, which is a large component of calculus. These results may have practical implications for teaching calculus at the undergraduate level and may, with further research, help to narrow the gender gap in the STEM fields

City Know-How

Human health and planetary health are influenced by city lifestyles, city leadership, and city development. For both, worrying trends are leading to increasing concern and it is imperative that human health and environmental impacts become core foci in urban policy. Changing trajectory will require concerted action; the journal Cities & Health is dedicated to supporting the flow of knowledge, in all directions, to help make this happen. We wish to foster communication between researchers, practitioners, policy-makers, communities, and decision-makers in cities. This is the purpose of the City Know-how section of the journal. ‘Research for city practice’ disseminates lessons from research by explaining key messages for city leaders, communities, and the professions involved in city policy and practice. ‘City shorts’ provide glimpses of what is being attempted or achieved ‘on the ground’ and ’case studies’ are where you will find evaluations of interventions. Last, ‘Commentary and debate’ extends conversations we are having to develop and mobilize much needed new thinking. Join in these conversations. In order to strengthen the community of interest, we would like to include many and varied voices, including those from younger practitioners and researchers who are supporting health and health equity in everyday urban lives

Rethinking place-making: aligning placeness factors with perceived urban design qualities (PUDQs) to improve the built environment in historical district

Understanding the concept of place is critically important for urban design and place-making practice, and this research attempted to investigate the pathways by which perceived urban design qualities (PUDQs) influence placeness factors in the Chinese context. Twelve hypotheses were developed and combined in a structural equation model for validation. The Tanhualin historical district in Wuhan, China was selected for the analysis. As a result, place attachment was verified as a critical bridge factor that mediated the influence of PUDQs on place satisfaction. Among the five selected PUDQs, walkability and space quality were revealed as the most influential factors associated with place attachment and place satisfaction. Accessibility was actually indirectly beneficial to place-making via the mediation of walkability. Corresponding implications and strategies were discussed to maintain the sense of place for historic districts

Reflections on a Retrofit: Organizational Commitment, Perceived Productivity and Controllability in a Building Lighting Project in the United States

The luminous environment affects how office workers perceive their work setting. However, research on how the lighting commissioning process associates with psychosocial variables relevant to office settings is lacking. This case study explored the extent to which employees working on a recently retrofitted floor of an administrative office building believed they could control the new lighting system. It also measured their levels of perceived productivity and affective organizational commitment to examine correlations between these variables and levels of satisfaction with the lighting commissioning process. Satisfaction with the commissioning process did not significantly correlate with perceived productivity, controllability, affective organizational commitment, or the average number of productive work hours reported after the retrofit. However, perceived productivity significantly and positively associated with perceived controllability and affective organizational commitment. Also, controllability and affective organizational commitment both significantly correlated with the number of productive work hours perceived. Results support interdisciplinary studies emphasizing the importance of lighting controllability in improving employees’ perceived performance and satisfaction at work. Results also offer practical suggestions concerning the commissioning process used in the case study. © 2018 Elsevier Lt

Sound and the healthy city

At an international level it is recognised that urban noise has serious and negative public health impacts. This leading editorial and the special issue it accompanies seeks to broaden this agenda. An important goal for Cities & Health is to give ear to new urban health topics, methods and collaborations. In doing so this paper presents the topic of urban sound and health from several unique angles. At its core, we deliberately move the focus beyond noise levels, as measured by decibels, and harm to health through the stress of relentless background noise. Instead, we focus on the concept of soundscape, a more qualitatively nuanced research subject of enquiry. The paper serves as an introduction to soundscape and health from several distinct disciplinary positions and lays a good intellectual foundation for the twenty-two papers published in this special issue. We hope that through a soundscape approach we can encourage fresh thinking about urban sound, including how people perceive and relate to their sonic environments, and show how sound can contribute to health. We believe that this approach can provide a collaborative platform for sound artists, sound technologists, urbanists and local people to work together with public health and create healthier urban environments.Publisher's Versio