Making the Pap smear into the "right tool" for the job

Despite being a rather recalcitrant tool, the "Pap smear" is today the major cancer screening technology in the world. This paper examines how and why hetrogeneous actors chose to advocate the Pap smear as a screen for cervical cancer in the late 1940's, and to tinker both in and far beyond the diagnostic laboratory for over 50 years to make the Pap smear "fit" as a screening and clinical technology. Tinkerings included gendering the division of labour, attempting to automate reading of smears, juggling costs, exploring alternative screening technologies, pushing for regulation of laboratories, and settling for locally-negotiated orders of clinical accuracy instead of global standardization, still elusive today.     

The money trail: a new historiography for networks, patronage, and scientific careers

Money is everywhere in science. Yet historians have only rarely placed the money trail at the center of their analyses. The essays in this Focus section demonstrate that following the money offers a historiographical path for investigating a number of key issues across disciplinary boundaries in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Drawing on cases and materials relating to a number of scientific fields, including electrical engineering, aeronautics, agriculture, and paleontology, the essays examine the continuous role of money in industrial and military patronage, personal connections and networks, and spatial and geographical dimensions of science, as well as in relation to state funding and ownership. Together, the contributions demonstrate how following the money offers a way of overcoming hyperprofessionalism in the history of science.     

Implementing the flipped classroom: an exploration of study behaviour and student performance

The flipped classroom is becoming more popular as a means to support student learning in higher education by requiring students to prepare before lectures and actively engaging students during lectures. While some research has been conducted into student performance in the flipped classroom, students’ study behaviour throughout a flipped course has not been investigated. This study explored students’ study behaviour throughout a flipped and a regular course by means of bi-weekly diaries. Furthermore, student references to their learning regulation were explored in course evaluations. Results from the diaries showed that students’ study behaviour in the flipped course did not appear to be very different from that of students in a regular course. Furthermore, study behaviour did not appear strongly related to student performance in both the flipped and the regular course. Exploration of student references to their learning regulation in the course evaluations showed that some students experienced the flipped course design as intended to support their learning process. Other students, however, demonstrated resistance to changing their study behaviour even though changing study behaviour is expected in order to benefit from the flipped classroom. Further research on the relationship between students’ learning regulation and actual study behaviour and course results is necessary to understand when and why implementing the flipped classroom is successful. Recommendations that may help more effective flipped classroom implementation include considering the prior history between students and instructor(s), the broader curriculum context, and frequent expectation communication especially with large numbers of students and non-mandatory lecture attendance.     

Institutional frameworks and innovation in the German and UK pharmaceutical industry

This paper analyzes how governance structures impact the innovation capabilities of leading German and UK firms in the pharmaceutical industry. Our main objective is to show how variation in national institutional frameworks influences the innovation process, and thus, relative performance. There are two main conclusions. First, the corporate governance structure allowed leading UK firms to more quickly adapt than German firms to rapidly changing external environmental conditions in the global pharmaceutical industry. Secondly, leading UK firms have an advantage in generating innovative drugs (“blockbusters”) than do German firms due to the nature of the institutional framework in which they are embedded.     

Conceptual change in natural resource management students’ ecological literacy*

Conceptual change in undergraduate capstone courses provides unique opportunities to examine how students draw from multiple courses and experiences to resolve conceptual confusion. We examined how senior-level natural resource management students revised their conceptions of ‘ecosystem’ throughout their capstone course. The concept of ecosystem is complicated by a lack of shared meaning across disciplines. Our grounded theory study analyzed student coursework and pre/post interviews. It was informed by socio-cultural and conceptual change theories and used an ecological literacy metric to examine how students’ conceptualizations of the relationships between natural, ecosystem, human, and human artifact influenced their conceptions of ecosystems. Students who did not describe ecosystems as natural struggled less with integrating human society into ecosystems than their peers that did. We conclude that it is important to explicitly create shared meaning of key conceptions at the start of a capstone course to facilitate shared meaning-making and desired conceptual change during the course.     

Developing Leadership Skills for Reference Librarians: The Case for Planning a Local Conference

The planning, development, and organization of a one-day or multiple-day conference is time consuming, challenging, and requires a well-prepared framework. This article discusses the guidelines and strategies developed by the Southeast Florida Library Information Network Reference Committee for the organization of a successful local conference. These guidelines offer a model for any organization that is planning a conference and for incorporating future events into the planning process. They also serve as a collaborative model for what a regional network can achieve toward promoting and providing professional development and leadership opportunities for its libraries, librarians, and library staff.     

Overt and Relational Victimization: A Meta‐Analytic Review of Their Overlap and Associations With Social–Psychological Adjustment

This meta‐analytic review includes 135 studies, representing 17 countries, of child and adolescent (ages 4–17) samples of overt and relational peer victimization and examines the magnitude of overlap between forms of victimization and associations with five social–psychological adjustment indices. Results indicate a strong intercorrelation between forms of victimization ( = .72). No gender difference with regard to relational victimization was found, but boys were slightly higher in overt victimization. Overt victimization is more strongly associated with overt aggression; relational victimization is more strongly related to internalizing problems, lower levels of received prosocial behavior from peers, and relational aggression. Both forms are related to externalizing problems. Age and method of assessment were explored as potential sources of variability in effect sizes.