“Both my Cleansed Hands”

This short contribution edits for the first time a small fragment housed in the Horn Archaeological Museum at St Andrews University, Berrien Springs, Michigan. This fragment contains the meagre remains of what once was a letter addressed to the goddess Ištar sent by a woman named Abī-tukultī. Literary letters of the Old Babylonian period are fairly scarce, and the present text is the first known letter to Ištar and hence a welcome addition to the corpus.

Measures of Student Engagement as Predictors of Grade Point Average (GPA) and Degree Completion at Andrews University

Purpose of the Study In a time of rising costs, social discourse questioning value of an undergraduate degree, and declining enrollment, institutions of higher education are under increasing pressure to provide stakeholders and potential students with measures of accountability and student success. These pressures renew the need to leverage student engagement data to understand what makes undergraduates successful in their academic programs. An understanding of student engagement factors is key to helping all students succeed, but especially to identifying areas that colleges and universities can devote their attention in order to improve their students’ likelihood of success. The purpose of this study was to investigate the relationship between student engagement and both academic performance and degree completion. Method The present study was designed as a secondary quantitative analysis of non-experimental descriptive data collected using survey methodology. The instrument, referred to as the NSSE, was used to gather information on students’ engagement with their coursework, peers, professors, and academic institution. The data was gathered from 375 first-year and senior undergraduate students attending Andrews University in 2013 and 2015. Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) was used to determine a statistical model to use student engagement variables to predict for student GPA scores. Discriminant Function Analysis (DFA) was used to determine which student engagement variables were best able to discriminate between students who would and those who would not complete their academic degree. Results Upon some revision, the SEM model for the first-year students predicted 19% of GPA and indicated that the most important predictors were Academic Challenge and Student-Faculty Interaction. Also, upon some revision, the SEM model for the senior students predicted 9% of GPA. This senior model indicated that the only significant predictor of GPA was Quality of Interactions. DFA for first-year students was statistically significant and predicted degree completion at a rate of 66.9%, with the best predictors (both positive) being Learning Strategies and Reflective & Integrative Learning. DFA for senior students was not statistically significant. Conclusions Engagement factors are important in predicting first-year student GPA and likelihood of degree completion. Engagement factors that predict GPA are different and weaker for senior students, and do not predict likelihood of degree completion. This study provides evidence for the increase of specific types of engagement to improve student success and graduation rates.

Sir James Whyte Black OM. 14 June 1924—22 March 2010

James Whyte Black was a Scottish pharmacologist who trained in medicine at St Andrews University and had a career in drug invention and academic pharmacology, moving several times between universities and the pharmaceutical industry. He was awarded the 1988 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his drug invention method, which was to build molecules around the structure of a natural chemical activator of a pathway involved in the aetiology of a disease. This produced two extremely useful drug categories, beta-blockers and histamine H 2 -antagonists, with huge impact on the previously intractable diseases of angina, hypertension and stomach ulcers. In 2000 he was awarded the UK's highest honour, the Order of Merit (OM). His ideas on analytical pharmacology had a significant effect on the development of the discipline in the late twentieth century.

The contribution of Henry Charles Williamson (1871–1949) to Scottish and Canadian fisheries research

The Scottish zoologist Henry Charles Williamson was one of a group of young men who initiated fisheries science in the late Victorian age, schooled under Professor William Carmichael McIntosh at St Andrews University. Initially working for the Fishery Board of Scotland, Williamson contributed original studies on fish anatomy, morphology, systematics and life cycles; decapod Crustacea life-history stages; fish diseases and parasites. He was at the forefront of attempts to transport herring ova to Australia and New Zealand to introduce this European food fish to antipodean waters. That involved him researching how to retard development of ova using low temperatures and developing glass settlement-plate techniques for their transportation. He left Scotland in 1925 to spend five years in the Canadian Pacific, studying salmon migration by tagging and latterly becoming responsible for pilchard and herring work there too. Returning to his home town of Dundee in retirement, he lived a quiet life, giving talks to local groups, supporting his church's administration and contributing articles to the fishermen's press. Sadly he died before he could complete the two volumes on fishes that he was in the course of writing.