This work investigates how ecological literacy and nature connectedness can be fostered in children aged 8–12 through engagement with a toolkit for place-based nature education. Children growing up in urban environments often lack access to nature, leading to lower ecological literacy and feeling less connected to the natural world. To help children reconnect with nature, we propose situating nature education in local environments, facilitated by a toolkit developed through a research-through-design approach that combines methods and perspectives from material-driven, participatory, and more-than-human design. Material explorations and a workshop with primary school children informed the conceptualisation of the toolkit, which invites children to shape mycelium-receptive artefacts, place them in local environments, and observe their transformation over time. Using clay as a substitute material, the shaping and placing activities were tested with 71 primary school children across four classes, alongside imaginative and reflective activities to encourage empathy and sensitivity toward fungi. Findings suggest that the shaping, placing, and reflecting activities can support ecological literacy and caring relationships with non-human organisms, indicating the potential of place-based, more-than-human learning tools to enrich nature education and reconnect children with nature.

Social media offers research teams new opportunities for outreach and study recruitment; however, research teams often need guidance and tools on how to use social media to effectively recruit for their clinical trials. To address this gap, the Recruitment Innovation Center (RIC) developed a new, comprehensive toolkit informed by community feedback and extensive RIC experience. The toolkit contains guidance and considerations for using social media to recruit clinical trial participants, including best practices, platform-specific strategies, and customizable templates. This paper details the creation and contents of this new, free resource.

Actively engaging community health centers (CHCs) in research is necessary to ensure evidence-based practices are relevant to all communities and get us closer to closing the health equity gap. We report here on the Boston HealthNet Research Collaborative, a partnership between health centers, Boston HealthNet and the Boston University Clinical, and Translational Science Institute with the explicit goal of supporting research partnerships early in the planning phase of the study lifecycle. We used the principles of community engagement guided by a collective impact framework to codesign, pilot, and evaluate a process for facilitating research partnerships. Accomplishments in the first 2 years include a web-based Toolkit with a step-by-step guide and an active learning collaborative with health center representatives to support research capacity building. The process resulted in 81 new research project partnerships across 50 individual research projects. Most research partnership requests were made later in the research lifecycle, after the planning phase. Partnership acceptance was largely driven by the Collaborative’s pre-defined Guiding Principles and Rules of Engagement. These lessons drive an iterative process to improve the longitudinal relationship between our translational research program and our CHC partners.

Older adults have largely been excluded from health research despite bearing a disproportionate disease burden. The Community Engagement Studio (CES) model, initially developed at Vanderbilt University in 2009, allows potential research participants to help shape research to promote greater inclusion. The University of Pittsburgh adapted the CES model for older adults (OA-CES). Tailored specifically to older adults, OA-CES addresses underrepresentation in research by gathering valuable feedback that allows investigators to make research more accessible and relevant to older people. An OA-CES toolkit will help in adapting the model in other research areas to close the gap in research inclusion.

Clinical trials face many challenges with meeting projected enrollment and retention goals. A study’s recruitment materials and messaging convey necessary key information and therefore serve as a critical first impression with potential participants. Yet study teams often lack the resources and skills needed to develop engaging, culturally tailored, and professional-looking recruitment materials. To address this gap, the Recruitment Innovation Center recently developed a Recruitment & Retention Materials Content and Design Toolkit, which offers research teams guidance, actionable tips, resources, and customizable templates for creating trial-specific study materials. This paper seeks to describe the creation and contents of this new toolkit.

Virtual reality (VR)-based rehabilitation has been widely implemented to maintain and increase patient motivation during therapy sessions. Researchers nowadays design VR-based rehabilitation by leveraging off-the-shelf VR devices for easy access and application. However, researchers need to implement additional custom hardware or incorporate a specific algorithm to perform a real-time evaluation of each therapeutic movement. This study aims to design and develop a system with features for recognizing and measuring the upper limb rehabilitation movement in VR using off-the-shelf VR devices such as VR headsets, controllers, and trackers. This system is bundled and distributed as a single toolkit to accommodate other researchers in providing the evaluation feature for their VR-based rehabilitation system. The user experiment was conducted to verify the usability of this proposed design system. The experiment results show that the system can recognize 16 upper limb movements and provide several measurement data that researchers can use in providing the evaluation feature based on their design requirements.

With the increasing utilization of machine learning (ML) to enhance products’ capabilities, the design research community has begun to explore how to support the conceptual design of ML-enhanced products. However, UX value creation of ML-enhanced products is still challenging because of ML's unique characteristics and numerous complex factors in conceptual design. To help designers create UX value for ML-enhanced products, we developed the UX value framework and the CoMLUX design process. The proposed framework describes how ML, stakeholders, and context co-create the UX value of ML-enhanced products, and identifies the growability and opacity of ML, helping designers systematically understand the co-creators while avoiding cognitive overload. The CoMLUX design process provides practical guidance for designing ML-enhanced products with growability and transparency. At last, we demonstrate the usage methods of the framework and process in an actual project and summarize the inspirations and limitations of our work.

The Recruitment Innovation Center (RIC) has created a toolkit of novel strategies to engage potential participants in response to recruitment and retention challenges associated with COVID-19 studies. The toolkit contains pragmatic, generalizable resources to help research teams increase awareness of clinical trials and opportunities to participate; produce culturally sensitive and engaging recruitment materials; improve consent and return of results processes; and enhance recruitment of individuals from populations disproportionately impacted by COVID-19. This resource, the “RIC COVID-19 Recruitment and Retention Toolkit,” is available free online. We describe the toolkit and the community feedback used to author and curate this resource.

Crop wild relatives (CWR) are a vital source of traits for crop improvement – therefore, conserving CWR diversity is critical to ensure food, nutrition and economic security. Efficient CWR conservation planning is a critical first step to maintain this natural resource for future use. The development of National Strategic Action Plans (NSAPs) for the conservation and sustainable use of CWR is an effective means of conservation planning and also plays an important role in sensitizing policy makers and other stakeholders to the importance of CWR. Tools to guide and facilitate countries in CWR national conservation planning and NSAP development have been prepared, namely: an ‘Interactive Toolkit for CWR Conservation Planning’, a ‘Template for the Preparation of a NSAP for the Conservation and Sustainable Use of CWR’, a ‘Template for the Preparation of a Technical Background Document for a NSAP for the Conservation and Sustainable Use of CWR’, a ‘CWR Checklist and Inventory Data Template’ and an ‘Occurrence Data Collation Template’. In this short communication, we briefly explain what these tools are, how they were developed, how they can be used and where they can be found.

The Dissemination and Implementation Research Core, a research methods core from the Clinical and Translation Science Award at Washington University in St. Louis Institute of Clinical and Translational Sciences, developed toolkits about dissemination and implementation (D&I) concepts (e.g., D&I outcomes, strategies). This paper reports on the development of the toolkits. These toolkits respond to 3 identified needs for capacity building in D&I research: resources for investigators new to the D&I field, consolidation of tools, and limitations in local contexts.

When a large chemical incident occurs and people are injured, public health agencies need to be able to provide guidance and respond to questions from the public, the media, and public officials. Because of this urgent need for information to support appropriate public health action, the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (ATSDR) of the US Department of Health and Human Services has developed the Assessment of Chemical Exposures (ACE) Toolkit. The ACE Toolkit, available on the ATSDR website, offers materials including surveys, consent forms, databases, and training materials that state and local health personnel can use to rapidly conduct an epidemiologic investigation after a large-scale acute chemical release. All materials are readily adaptable to the many different chemical incident scenarios that may occur and the data needs of the responding agency. An expert ACE team is available to provide technical assistance on site or remotely. (Disaster Med Public Health Preparedness. 2016;10:631–632)