The present study investigated the influence of a weight loss reality TV show on body satisfaction, mood and food consumption. Young Australian women (N = 99) first completed baseline measures of state body satisfaction and mood. They were then randomly allocated to either a weight loss or a home renovation programme and were provided with snack foods during viewing. Post-measures included state body satisfaction, state mood and trait dietary restraint and snack food consumption. BMI moderated the relationship between condition and body satisfaction and mood. Larger women experienced less body satisfaction and less positive mood in response to the weight loss programme. Dietary restraint moderated the relationship between condition and food consumption. A greater percentage of women with lower dietary restraint ate in the control condition; whilst a greater percentage of women with higher dietary restraint ate food whilst watching the weight loss programme. These findings highlight the potential negative impact of weight-focused reality TV on mood, body satisfaction and snack food consumption among some women.

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Open-ended problems are challenging for many students because they often have little sense of what a "correct" answer would be and struggle with evaluating the quality of an answer derived from a calculator or computer model. It is difficult for them to see patterns or associate one type of problem with another and they have few intuitive skills to use to judge the completeness of their answers. These can be significant obstacles for students who don't define themselves as mathematicians, but whose careers require what we will call "mathematical intuition" to support the use of technology in solving problems and to anticipate a correct solution.The goal of this paper is to describe a project-based learning experience that has the potential to help students build their mathematical intuition by requiring them to formally estimate within the solution process. By requiring estimations, the project becomes open-ended; students understand that their answers are not exact, or 'right', but are still valid. Framing the project as one that corresponds well to students' sense of what one 'does' in their discipline provides a greater degree of student autonomy in completing the project because they understand what a completed project should look like. Finally, allowing students to work in teams encourages the dialogs that often help establish the 'reasonableness' of the results. This project was assigned to two groups of lower division students in media arts and engineering, taught, respectively, by the two authors.

The objective of this work is to present a strategy for the development and implementation of the Environments for Fostering Effective Critical Thinking (EFFECTs) pedagogical framework in a mathematics classroom, called Math-EFFECTS. A primary goal of Math-EFFECTs is to enhance the timely integration of mathematical solution techniques with engineering, technology and applied science applications.EFFECTs was developed by a team of researchers at the University of South Carolina under funding from the National Science Foundation. It has been disseminated via the web and has over a dozen practitioners who have applied the framework to concepts such as geotechnical engineering, thermodynamics, mechanics, numerical methods, and scientific visualization, working with students at all stages of their engineering education [1]. The central learning goals of engineering EFFECTs are to (i) improve the understanding and retention of a specific set of concepts that provide core knowledge and (ii) encourage students to recognize and develop critical thinking skills that lead to earlier growth in engineering judgment. The primary application of EFFECTs has focused on enhancing the understanding of underlying engineering concepts and developing critical thinking. However, the framework can also be used to more effectively present and teach core mathematical concepts, encourage the critical mathematical thinking associated with real-world problem solving, and effectively link formal mathematics concepts to students' applications of mathematics at an earlier stage in their education.

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