From the Editor Emerita

Since 1997, Zahava D. Doering has contributed to Curator: The Museum Journal. This is her last issue as Curator editor. The article highlights the key issues for which the journal has provided a platform to its global readership during her editorship. Issues include psychological and physical access, social roles and responsibility, health, museums without walls, crowdsourcing, environmental sustainability, and human rights and diversity. It also extends gratitude to the editorial staff (named), editorial board members, peer reviewers, and authors she has had the honor to have as colleagues in supporting new dialogues for museums and other cultural venues.     

Understanding complex ecologies: an investigation of student experiences in adventure learning programs

The GoNorth! Adventure Learning (AL) Series delivered educational programs about global climate change and sustainability from 2006 to 2010 via a hybrid-learning environment that included a curriculum designed with activities that worked in conjunction with the travels of Team GoNorth! as they dog sledded throughout the circumpolar Arctic. This study addresses a gap in the AL literature by identifying factors that lead to high levels of student engagement and reveals strategies for instructional designers and educators on how to design emotionally engaging online learning environments. A mixed methods study was conducted to explore patterns of learner engagement in relation to two AL programs: GoNorth! Fennoscandia 2008 and GoNorth! Nunavut 2009. Survey data were drawn from a total of 101 students in 2008 and 2009.     

Playing smartphone games while studying: an experimental study on reading interruptions by a smartphone game

Education and Information Technologies - In this study, we investigated whether the use of smartphone games while reading a text reduces learning performance or reading speed. We also examined...     

Field-based professional development of teachers engaged in distance education: experiences from the Arctic

We examine the experiences of five teachers who traveled with a team of educators, scientists, and explorers on circumpolar Arctic expeditions to deliver adventure learning (AL) programs to K–12 students at a distance. Results highlight the personal and professional impacts this opportunity had on teachers, including their empowering, fulfilling, and mentally exhausting experiences while assisting in delivering distance education to students worldwide. The article concludes with a discussion of issues to consider in the development of similar programs.     

A Multicomponent Library Resource Model to Enhance Academic Global Health Education Among Residency Programs

Global health is becoming an increasingly important component of medical education. Medical libraries have an opportunity to assist global health residents with their information needs, but first it is important to identify what those needs are and how best they can be addressed. This article reports a collaboration between global health faculty and an academic medical librarian to assess the information needs of global health pathway residents and how assessment data are used to create a multicomponent program designed to enhance global health education.     

Concentrations of sex hormones in umbilical-cord blood: their relation to sex and birth order of infants.

In 3 groups of human newborns, 5 sex hormones were assayed from samples of umbilical-cord blood, and concentrations were analyzed by the sex and birth order of the infants. The 5 hormones assayed were testosterone, androstenedione, estrone, estradiol, and progesterone. Concentrations of testosterone were significantly greater in males than females. The other 4 hormones did not differ significantly by sex. In both sexes, firstborns had significantly more progesterone and estrogens, with progesterone showing the largest birth-order effects. Among male infants, firstborns had higher concentrations of testosterone. The higher concentrations of progesterone in firstborns of both sexes, and of testosterone in firstborn boys, were found not to be due to length of labor, birth weight, or maternal age. However, they were a function of temporal spacing of childbirths. Later borns who were closely spaced in relation to their next-older siblings had lower concentrations of hormones. The effect of temporal separation was greater on male than female infants for each of the 5 hormones studied. The results are discussed in terms of the possible effects of hormone "depletion" on the psychological development of closely spaced later borns.     

Influence of motivational design on completion rates in online self‐study pharmacy‐content courses

Student retention rates are a constant concern in higher education, but this concern has become especially challenging as online courses become more common and there are widespread reports of low completion rates for online, self‐study courses. We evaluated four self‐study online pharmacy courses with a history of very high completion rates for motivational design features, as an explanation for the difference in completion rates between these classes and those reported in the literature. The validated Instructional Materials Motivation Survey [IMMS] (Keller, 1987) and an open‐ended survey based on Keller’s (1987) ARCS components were used to assess the design and instructional materials of these courses for motivational influence. Specifically, the ARCS components of attention, relevance, confidence, and satisfaction were measured and then compared. Findings suggest that the extent and type of educational scaffolding does impact the motivational effectiveness of self‐study, in online pharmacy‐content courses.