The characteristics of impaired fasting glucose associated with obesity and dyslipidaemia in a Chinese population

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Different populations have diverse patterns of relationships between Impaired Fasting Glucose (IFG) and obesity and lipid markers, it is important to investigate the characteristics of associations between IFG and other related risk factors including body mass index (BMI), waist circumstance (WC), serum lipids and blood pressure (BP) in a Chinese population.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>This was a case-control study of 648 IFG subjects and 1,296 controls derived from a large-scale, community-based, cross-sectional survey of 10,867 participants. Each subject received a face-to-face interview, physical examination, and blood tests, including fasting blood glucose and lipids. Student's <it>t</it>-test, Chi-square test, Spearman correlation and multiple logistic regressions were used for the statistical analyses.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>Fasting plasma glucose (FPG) was positively correlated with BMI, WC, systolic blood pressure (SBP), diastolic blood pressure (DBP), triglyceride (TG), and total cholesterol (TC), and was negatively correlated with high density lipoprotein-cholesterol (HDL-C) (all p < 0.05). BMI was more strongly correlated with IFG than with WC. The correlation coefficient of FPG was remarkably higher with TG (0.244) than with TC (0.134) and HDL-C (-0.192). TG was an important predictor of IFG, with odds ratios of 1.76 (95%CI: 1.31-2.36) for subjects with borderline high TG level (1.70 mmol/l ≤ TG < 2.26 mmol/l) and 3.13 (95% CI: 2.50-3.91) for those with higher TG level (TG ≥ 2.26 mmol/l), when comparing to subjects with TG < 1.70 mmol/l. There was a significant dose-response relationship between the number of abnormal variables and increased risk of IFG.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>In this Chinese population, both BMI and WC were important predictors of IFG. Abnormal TG as a lipid marker was more strongly associated with IFG than were TC and HDL-C. These factors should be taken into consideration simultaneously for prevention of IFG.</p

The Etiology of Science Performance: Decreasing Heritability and Increasing Importance of the Shared Environment From 9 to 12 Years of Age

During childhood and adolescence, increases in heritability and decreases in shared environmental influences have typically been found for cognitive abilities. A sample of more than 2,500 pairs of twins from the Twins Early Development Study was used to investigate whether a similar pattern would be found for science performance from 9 to 12 years. Science performance was based on teacher-assessed U.K. National Curriculum standards. Science at 9 years showed high heritability (64%) and modest shared environmental (16%) estimates. In contrast to the expected developmental pattern, heritability was significantly lower at 12 years (47%) and shared environmental influences were significantly higher (32%). Understanding what these increasingly important shared environmental influences are could lead to interventions that encourage engagement in science throughout the lifespan

1, 2, 3, 4: Infusing Quantitative Literacy into Introductory Biology

Biology of the twenty-first century is an increasingly quantitative science. Undergraduate biology education therefore needs to provide opportunities for students to develop fluency in the tools and language of quantitative disciplines. Quantitative literacy (QL) is important for future scientists as well as for citizens, who need to interpret numeric information and data-based claims regarding nearly every aspect of daily life. To address the need for QL in biology education, we incorporated quantitative concepts throughout a semester-long introductory biology course at a large research university. Early in the course, we assessed the quantitative skills that students bring to the introductory biology classroom and found that students had difficulties in performing simple calculations, representing data graphically, and articulating data-driven arguments. In response to students' learning needs, we infused the course with quantitative concepts aligned with the existing course content and learning objectives. The effectiveness of this approach is demonstrated by significant improvement in the quality of students' graphical representations of biological data. Infusing QL in introductory biology presents challenges. Our study, however, supports the conclusion that it is feasible in the context of an existing course, consistent with the goals of college biology education, and promotes students' development of important quantitative skills

What Students Say Versus What They Do Regarding Scientific Inquiry

Science Education, Vol. 98, No. 1, pp. 1–35We teach a course for elementary education undergraduates that gives students an opportunity to conduct open-ended scientific inquiry and pursue their own scientific questions in much the sameway that practicing research scientists do. In this study,we compared what our students say declaratively about the nature of science (NOS) in surveys and interviews with what they do procedurally when engaged in authentic scientific practice. Initially, we were surprised when our students showed very little change on two different validated NOS questionnaires, adhering to seemingly memorized definitions of key NOS vocabulary such as “science” and “experiment.” In contrast, on procedural measures of NOS understanding, students developed a decidedly sophisticated approach to answering scientific questions. Our data suggest that students’ declarative understandings about the NOS are not a reliable measure of students’ ability to engage productively in scientific practices and vice versa. We discuss why this might be and consider the implications of this disconnect on identifying the best approach to NOS instruction and on future science education research

Curriculum design for inquiry: Preservice elementary teachers' mobilization and adaptation of science curriculum materials

Curriculum materials are crucial tools with which teachers engage students in science as inquiry. In order to use curriculum materials effectively, however, teachers must develop a robust capacity for pedagogical design, or the ability to mobilize a variety of personal and curricular resources to promote student learning. The purpose of this study was to develop a better understanding of the ways in which preservice elementary teachers mobilize and adapt existing science curriculum materials to plan inquiry-oriented science lessons. Using quantitative methods, we investigated preservice teachers' curriculum design decision-making and how their decisions influenced the inquiry orientations of their planned science lessons. Findings indicate that preservice elementary teachers were able to accurately assess how inquiry-based existing curriculum materials are and to adapt them to make them more inquiry-based. However, the inquiry orientations of their planned lessons were in large part determined by how inquiry-oriented curriculum materials they used to plan their lessons were to begin with. These findings have important implications for the design of teacher education experiences that foster preservice elementary teachers' pedagogical design capacities for inquiry, as well as the development of inquiry-based science curriculum materials that support preservice and beginning elementary teachers to engage in effective science teaching practice. © 2009 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Res Sci Teach 47:820–839, 2010Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/84401/1/20379_ftp.pd

Scientific explanations: Characterizing and evaluating the effects of teachers' instructional practices on student learning

Teacher practices are essential for supporting students in scientific inquiry practices, such as the construction of scientific explanations. In this study, we examine what instructional practices teachers engage in when they introduce scientific explanation and whether these practices influence students' ability to construct scientific explanations during a middle school chemistry unit. Thirteen teachers enacted a project-based chemistry unit, How can I make new stuff from old stuff? , with 1197 seventh grade students. We videotaped each teacher's enactment of the focal lesson on scientific explanation and then coded the videotape for four different instructional practices: modeling scientific explanation, making the rationale of scientific explanation explicit, defining scientific explanation, and connecting scientific explanation to everyday explanation. Our results suggest that when teachers introduce scientific explanation, they vary in the practices they engage in as well as the quality of their use of these practices. We also found that teachers' use of instructional practices can influence student learning of scientific explanation and that the effect of these instructional practices depends on the context in terms of what other instructional practices the teacher uses. © 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Res Sci Teach 45: 53–78, 2008Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/57509/1/20201_ftp.pd