Misinformation as well as the proliferation of fake news has been a problem during COVID-19 pandemic. This has affected many vulnerable communities in Brazil. The ability to understand and sort out pieces of reliable information and fake news has become a fundamental cognitive skill. In this study we report on the development of a serious game (a card-based role-playing game) using Brazilian folk heroes aimed to develop critical thinking skills to empower vulnerable communities affected by misinformation and fake news. Four groups located in the city of Goiânia (Brazil) participated in this research: one group of people experiencing homelessness; two groups of favela residents (one urban and one in the suburbs) and one group of recyclable material collectors from a cooperative. We gained entry and built trust with each of these groups and worked together for 10 months during the pandemic. We conducted participatory observations, individual interviews with each participant and discussed their daily interaction with information, specifically in the context of the covid-19 pandemic. The analyses of the observations and interview data gave us a glimpse of the communicative needs of the groups. Inserting players into a narrative where they can make decisions based on critical thinking and their own reflections on the pandemic was important for building knowledge and developing critical thinking in these communities. The nature of the game (interactive and cooperative) allowed participants to focus on problem-solving skills and group work. It encouraged them to use real-life knowledge and skills to solve the fictional problems presented by the narrative.

Evaluative skill is the ability to accurately judge ideas on creativity (or originality), which is a critical component of creativity. Various aspects of creativity have been examined cross-culturally, but little research has focused on evaluative skill. The first goal of this study was to examine the measurement invariance of evaluative skill assessments, which were based on two types of divergent thinking tests (Line Meanings and Uses), between American ( = 341) and Chinese ( = 345) college students. Multi-group confirmatory factor analyses supported a two-factor model based on two types of evaluation tasks, and this model satisfied configural and weak invariance. However, partial strong invariance was satisfied only for the Uses evaluation task. Based on this evidence, our second goal was to explore the differences in evaluative skill between these two groups. Via latent mean comparisons, we found that American participants had better performance on evaluative skill based on the Uses evaluation task than their Chinese counterparts. Taken together, this study is one of the first to examine the cross-cultural differences in evaluative skill between American and Chinese adults. This study offered preliminary results showing some invariance in evaluative skill assessments across cultures and indicating cross-cultural differences in this ability.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, the education community has actively sought strategies to allow it to maintain operations; one such strategy is to switch from face-to-face to online teaching. Compared with other art disciplines, the use of technology in dance education has been seriously understudied. This study collected multiple forms of data, tapping into students' and instructors' viewpoints, to examine the use of Zoom to develop students' 4C skills (i.e., creativity, communication, collaboration, and critical thinking) and self-efficacy in dance education. A mixed-methods research design was adopted. Teacher observations and student surveys were conducted in a public university in Macau. The results showed significant increases in collaboration and creativity in the activities and assignments on Zoom. Critical thinking and communication skills did not change significantly in the Zoom-based dance class. Students were generally satisfied with the use of Zoom in dance class, but their self-reported self-efficacy significantly decreased after Zoom was introduced. The findings are discussed from both the students' and the instructor's perspectives.

This study investigated how COVID-19 impacted creative adolescent engagement with their creative activities, as well as how they utilized technology to cope with the pandemic. Using qualitative methods, this study was guided by phenomenology using both constructivist and transformative paradigms. Participants were English-speaking adolescents from the Midwest in the United States. They were identified as creative by their teachers according to known creative profiles and were invited to attend an all-day creative career workshop over Zoom, where the focus groups occurred for this study. Five focus groups, consisting of 25 participants, were conducted, guided by semi-structured interviews. The transcripts from the focus groups were analyzed using reflexive thematic analysis by the first, second, and third authors. Results indicated that COVID-19 affected creative adolescent engagement with creative activities in positive and negative ways, caused changes in emotions and motivation, and increased virtual creative engagement. Creative adolescents coped with COVID-19 using digital technology to connect with others virtually, to engage in virtual creative expression, inspiration, and growth, and to meet their personal needs. Implication of results is discussed.

This article has been retracted: please see Elsevier Policy on Article Withdrawal (https://www.elsevier.com/about/our-business/policies/article-withdrawal). This article has been retracted at the request of the Editors-in-Chief. After a thorough investigation, the Editors have concluded that the acceptance of this article was partly based upon the positive advice of one illegitimate reviewer report. The report was submitted from an email account which was provided to the journal as a suggested reviewer during the submission of the article. Although purportedly a real reviewer account, the Editors have concluded that this was not of an appropriate, independent reviewer. This manipulation of the peer-review process represents a clear violation of the fundamentals of peer review, our publishing policies, and publishing ethics standards. Apologies are offered to the reviewer whose identity was assumed and to the readers of the journal that this deception was not detected during the submission process.

The prevalence of pseudoscientific beliefs and fake news increased during the coronavirus crisis. Misinformation streams such as these potentially pose risks to people's health. Thus, knowing how these pseudoscientific beliefs and fake news impact the community of internists may be useful for improving primary care services. In this research, analyses of stress levels, effectiveness in detecting fake news, use of critical thinking (CP), and attitudes toward pseudosciences in internists during the COVID-19 crisis were performed. A total of 1129 internists participated. Several multiple regression models were applied using the forward stepwise method to determine the weight of CP and physicians' attitudes toward pseudosciences in predicting reductions in stress levels and facilitating the detection of fake news. The use of critical thinking predicted 46.9% of the reduction in stress levels. Similarly, skeptical attitudes and critical thinking predicted 56.1% of the hits on fake news detection tests. The stress levels of physicians during the coronavirus pandemic were clinically significant. The efficacy of fake news detection increases by 30.7% if the individual was a physician. Study outcomes indicate that the use of critical thinking and skeptical attitudes reduce stress levels and allow better detection of fake news. The importance of how to promote critical and skeptical attitudes in the field of medicine is discussed.

This article has been retracted: please see Elsevier Policy on Article Withdrawal (https://www.elsevier.com/about/our-business/policies/article-withdrawal). This article has been retracted at the request of the Editors-in-Chief. After a thorough investigation, the Editors have concluded that the acceptance of this article was partly based upon the positive advice of one illegitimate reviewer report. The report was submitted from an email account which was provided to the journal as a suggested reviewer during the submission of the article. Although purportedly a real reviewer account, the Editors have concluded that this was not of an appropriate, independent reviewer. This manipulation of the peer-review process represents a clear violation of the fundamentals of peer review, our publishing policies, and publishing ethics standards. Apologies are offered to the reviewer whose identity was assumed and to the readers of the journal that this deception was not detected during the submission process.

The aim of the study was to explore emotional and cognitive aspects of subjective wellbeing and flow in music and sports students during the lockdown imposed by the COVID-19 pandemic. Participants (314 higher education sports and music students) answered questions about measure of flow, satisfaction with life, satisfaction with studying, positive and negative affect, and COVID-19 impact. The results revealed differences in eight flow dimensions and a global flow score in favor of sports students. Differences were also found in affect: sports students experienced more positive affect and less negative affect than musicians. However, there were no significant differences with regard to satisfaction with life or satisfaction with study, and music and sports students perceived the COVID-19 impact equally. Gender differences were found for three flow dimensions and the global flow score (female students experienced flow less frequently than males) and satisfaction with studying (higher scores for female students). However, no gender differences were detected for satisfaction with life, positive and negative affect, or COVID-19 impact. The results of regression analyses showed that satisfaction with life and studying, positive and negative affect, and COVID-19 impact could all be predicted on the basis of flow dimensions.

Stress and threats have been shown to influence our cognition and performance. In a preregistered online experiment ( = 446), we examined whether thinking about the ongoing covid-19 pandemic influences creative (insight problem solving) and analytic thinking. We found no support for our a-priori hypothesized effect (decrease in insight problem solving and no change in analytical thinking), however, several unpredicted results emerged. Exploratory analyses revealed that both types of thinking were harmed, yet only in men. Interestingly, the effect of exposure on thinking about covid-19 was indirect and led to careless task completion - again, only in men. We discuss these intriguing results and propose potential explanations along with future studies directions.

It is often assumed that people with high ability in a domain will be excellent raters of quality within that same domain. This assumption is an underlying principle of using raters for creativity tasks, as in the Consensual Assessment Technique. While several prior studies have examined expert-novice differences in ratings, none have examined whether experts' ability to identify the quality of a creative product is being driven more by their ability to identify high quality work, low quality work, or both. To address this question, a sample of 142 participants completed individual difference measures and rated the quality of several sets of creative captions. Unbeknownst to the participants, the captions had been identified by expert raters as being of particularly high or low quality. Hierarchical regression analyses revealed that after controlling for participants' background and personality, those who scored significantly higher on any of three external measures of creativity also rated low-quality captions significantly lower than their peers; however, they did not rate the high-quality captions significantly higher. These findings support research in other domains suggesting that ratings of quality may be driven more by the lower end of the quality spectrum than the high end.

The world's current struggles with the health, economic and social impacts of the horrific Covid-19 pandemic and Australia's recent experience of climate crises, fire and flood, remind us that developing proficiency in addressing complex problems and working in interdisciplinary collaborative contexts are extraordinarily urgent. This worldwide pandemic poses potential social, political, economic and cultural catastrophes in addition to the immediate tragic outcomes for individuals and public health. Now more than ever we need to focus on developing our skills of creative and collaborative thinking. In this paper, I synthesise the research around creative collaboration, from a range of disciplines, and outline a framework to scaffold collaborative thinking in educational contexts to help students generate creative responses to complex problems. The framework develops students metacognitive understanding and epistemic awareness to enable meaningful epistemic shifting, perspective taking and cross disciplinary communication. Moving from epistemic awareness, through epistemic humility and epistemic empathy, students develop epistemic control. The article ends by calling for further research into the benefits of interdisciplinary metacognition across a range of learning contexts and a consideration of the need to go beyond often fixed adversarial critical thinking approaches and to develop an epistemic position based on inclusive collaboration and emergent creativity.

Mindfulness and creativity have both come to the forefront of educational interest-but a better understanding of their relationship and the implications for education is needed. This article reviews the literature on the intersection of these topics in order to understand where and how these two related but distinctive areas of research connect, and how this pertains to the complexity of education settings. Our goal is to understand findings from the literature and consider the implications for educational practice and research, with an eye to how mindfulness can be supportive to learners' creativity. This thematic review and qualitative analysis of extant literature identifies four themes that speak to the connection between mindfulness and creativity. There is solid evidence to show a generally beneficial and supportive relationship, in that practicing mindfulness can support creativity-but many factors affect this and there are a range of considerations for practice. This article reflects on the key findings of scholarly work on the mindfulness-creativity relationship with interpretative discussion and implications for educational research and practice.

The paper aims to introduce the conceptual framework of problem solving through values. The framework consists of problem analysis, selection of value(s) as a background for the solution, the search for alternative ways of the solution, and the rationale for the solution. This framework reveals when, how, and why is important to think about values when solving problems. A consistent process fosters cohesive and creative value-based thinking during problem solving rather than teaching specific values. Therefore, the framework discloses the possibility for enabling the development of value-grounded problem solving capability.The application of this framework highlights the importance of responsibility for the chosen values that are the basis for the alternatives which determine actions. The 4W framework is meaningful for the people's lives and their professional work. It is particularly important in the process of future professionals' education. Critical issues concerning the development of problem solving through values are discussed when considering and examining options for the implementation of the 4W framework in educational institutions.

Scientific reasoning is an important component under the cognitive strand of the 21st century skills and is highly emphasized in the new science education standards. This study focuses on the assessment of student reasoning in control of variables (COV), which is a core sub-skill of scientific reasoning. The main research question is to investigate the extent to which the existence of experimental data in questions impacts student reasoning and performance. This study also explores the effects of task contexts on student reasoning as well as students' abilities to distinguish between testability and causal influences of variables in COV experiments. Data were collected with students from both USA and China. Students received randomly one of two test versions, one with experimental data and one without. The results show that students from both populations (1) perform better when experimental data are not provided, (2) perform better in physics contexts than in real-life contexts, and (3) students have a tendency to equate non-influential variables to non-testable variables. In addition, based on the analysis of both quantitative and qualitative data, a possible progression of developmental levels of student reasoning in control of variables is proposed, which can be used to inform future development of assessment and instruction.