Thesis. The article presents the construction process and psychometric properties of the Critical Thinking Questionnaire (CThQ). The questionnaire is a critical thinking test tool designed for adolescents and adults. The basis for creating the questionnaire was classifying the educational goals proposed by Benjamin Bloom and spread by critical thinking practitioners. Methods. The independent rater system was used in the construction of the test, while the psychometric properties of the test were tested on a sample of 198 people, calculating the inter-correlation and the Cronbach’s Alpha reliability coefficient. Result. Both assessments of the independent rater system and research checking the psychometric properties of the test indicate high reliability of the tool. Cronbach’s Alpha coefficient of internal consistency was 0.87. In its final version, the test consists of 25 items, the results of which allow assessing critical thinking in 6 scales: remembering, understanding, applying, analysing, evaluating, and creating. The tool also allows checking the overall score.

The aim of this research was to compare the quality of life among University of the Third Age (U3A) students in Poland, where a novel method of educating seniors is being developed, with the quality of life among students at newly established U3As in Belarus and Ukraine, which have copied the Polish model. The research was also conducted to connect a range of socio-demographic variables with two explanatory ones: satisfaction with participation in U3A activities and the overall quality of life. A total of 515 U3A (N13) students from three Eastern European countries—Poland, Ukraine, and Belarus—took part in the research. The overall quality of life of U3A students was researched and expressed in the form of three components: stress level, sense of self-efficacy, and level of satisfaction with life. The following tools were used: PPS10 (Perceived Stress Scale), GSES (General Self-Efficacy Scale), and SWLS (Satisfaction with Life Scale). The research showed a statistically significant difference between the country of residence and the level of satisfaction with life, sense of self-efficacy, and the overall indicator of the quality of life. Polish seniors obtained higher results in all these areas when compared to their counterparts in Ukraine and Belarus.

Purpose: The human voice is a powerful and evolved social tool, with hundreds of studies showing that nonverbal vocal parameters robustly influence listeners' perceptions of socially meaningful speaker traits, ranging from perceived gender and age to attractiveness and trustworthiness. However, these studies have utilized a wide variety of voice stimuli to measure listeners' voice-based judgments of these traits. Here, in the largest scale study known to date, we test whether listeners judge the same unseen speakers differently depending on the complexity of the neutral speech stimulus, from single vowel sounds to a full paragraph. Method: In a playback experiment testing 2,618 listeners, we examine whether commonly studied voice-based judgments of attractiveness, trustworthiness, dominance, likability, femininity/masculinity, and health differ if listeners hear isolated vowels, a series of vowels, single words, single sentences (greeting), counting from 1 to 10, or a full paragraph recited aloud (Rainbow Passage), recorded from the same 208 men and women. Data were collected using a custom-designed interface in which vocalizers and traits were randomly assigned to raters. Results: Linear-mixed models show that the type of voice stimulus does indeed consistently affect listeners' judgments. Overall, ratings of attractiveness, trustworthiness, dominance, likability, health, masculinity among men, and femininity among women increase as speech duration increases. At the same time, speaker-level regression analyses show that interindividual differences in perceived speaker traits are largely preserved across voice stimuli, especially among those of a similar duration. Conclusions: Socially relevant perceptions of speakers are not wholly changed but rather moderated by the length of their speech. Indeed, the same vocalizer is perceived in a similar way regardless of which neutral statements they speak, with the caveat that longer utterances explain the most shared variance in listeners' judgments and elicit the highest ratings on all traits, possibly by providing additional nonverbal information to listeners. Supplemental Material: https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.21158890

This article attempts to bring together the most important educational priorities which should be taken into consideration when planning education in a world recovering from a pandemic. Some of the priorities discussed here should have already been taken into account during the 20th century, whilst others are completely new and result from changes that have come about in the 21st century, such as increased arrogance, ignorance, authoritarianism, educational insecurity, contempt for nature, confusion and the promotion of the lies under the name of post-truth . The authors propose a holistic approach to the education process, focused on priorities. In turn, the definition of those priorities should result from the most important problems that affect humanity.

This article tackles the problem of social involvement by academics and researchers. The author defines social responsibility widely as the involvement of knowledge, academics and educational institutions in solving the problems of the local community. The concept predicts that this can come about not only by disseminating research results, but also by involvement in pro-social activity without loss of autonomy. The author shows that this can be a way of building trust in science, as well as being a tool in opposing the anti-science culture. It can also be a means of rebuilding the status of science in a world of information bubbles and fake news.