The COVID-19 pandemic has dramatically changed the general population’s life worldwide. People may spend more time on social media because of policies like “work at home”. Using a cross-sectional dataset collected through an online survey in February 2020, in China, we examined (1) the relationships between social media activities and people’s mental health status and (2) the moderation effect of emotional-regulation strategies. The sample included people aged ≥18 years from 32 provinces and regions in China (N = 3159). The inferential analyses included a set of multiple linear regressions with interactions. Our results showed that sharing timely, accurate, and positive COVID-19 information, reducing excessive discussions on COVID-19, and promoting caring online interactions rather than being judgmental, might positively associate with the general public’s psychological well-being. Additionally, the relationships between social media activities and psychological well-being varied at different emotion-regulation strategy levels. Adopting the cognitive reappraisal strategy might allay the adverse relationships between certain social media activities and mental health indicators. Our findings expanded the theory of how social media activities can be associated with a human being’s mental health and how it can interact with emotion-regulation strategies during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Systematic studies on the effectiveness of in-service teacher professional development (PD) are important for science education research and practice. Previous studies have mostly focused on certain outcomes of PD, for example, the effectiveness of PD for improving teachers’ knowledge or students’ learning outcomes. This study, however, explores multiple outcomes of PD, from teachers’ change in knowledge and practice and how teacher change influences students’ beliefs and ultimately their understanding of interdisciplinary science concepts. The sample included 509 students from 23 classrooms within 5 elementary/middle schools. The results showed that teacher attendance in professional learning communities and interdisciplinary science research related positively to teachers’ scores on a pedagogical content knowledge test. Students whose teachers had more than 150 PD hours in the past academic year performed significantly better on an interdisciplinary science test. Follow-up analyses suggested that student understanding of the nature of science possibly mediates the positive effect between PD hours and student understanding of interdisciplinary science concepts.