Competency K
Design collaborative/individual learning experiences based on learning principles and theories.
Understanding the Competency
Competency K concerns the ability of information professionals to build learning experiences deliberately, on a foundation of established theory about how people actually learn. The word carrying the most weight in the competency statement is design. A program can succeed by accident, and an instructor can be effective through instinct alone. What this competency asks is something narrower and more demanding. It asks that I can explain why an experience was constructed the way it was, and name the principle that each decision rests on.
A learning experience, in this context, is any deliberately structured encounter meant to produce a lasting change in what someone knows, can do, or believes. That definition is broad by design. It covers an instruction session, a museum gallery, a staff training workshop, a public program, a digital exhibit, and an educational video. What they share is that someone made choices about sequence, format, pacing, and evidence of success. Those choices determined what a participant was able to carry away.
The competency distinguishes collaborative from individual experiences, and the distinction is not decorative. A collaborative experience produces learning partly through interaction among participants, as in a structured debate or a co-created exhibition. An individual experience is one a person moves through alone as with the tutorial or a video. The two are not interchangeable. Content that depends on a participant hearing a peer disagree cannot simply be filmed, and content built for a viewer who can pause and rewind cannot simply be delivered as a lecture.
Equally deliberate is the phrase a particular information environment. Learning theory developed largely with informal education, where attendance is required, sequence is controlled across months, and outcomes are graded. Most information professionals do not work there. Archives, museums, and libraries operate in what the field calls “free choice” or informal learning environments, where participation is voluntary, prior knowledge varies, and no one can be required to return. A theory that assumes a captive audience has to be adapted before it holds in a setting that participants can simply walk out of.
Underneath all of this sits the separation of teaching from learning. Presenting information is something the professional does. Learning is a change that occurs in the participant, or does not. These are not the same event, and the distance between them is exactly where instructional design operates. During my MLIS program at San Jose State University, I developed this competency through work that required me to build educational content for audiences I could not see and could not compel, and to design public programming around collections rather than simply around preservation. Those projects reinforced that an educational product is not justified by the importance of its subject matter. It is justified by whether a voluntary participant can get something durable out of it.
Contemporary Learning Theories
Constructivism is the foundation on which most contemporary practice and cultural institutions rests. Hein (1995) applied it directly to museums, arguing that visitors do not receive knowledge transmitted by an exhibition but actively construct meaning out of what they encounter, using what they already know. The consequence is a design consequence. If meaning is built rather than delivered, then an exhibition must offer several points of entry. It must not require a single prescribed path, must connect to experience a visitor already has, and must provide a range of ways to engage rather than one. A constructivist museum in Hein’s framing, is one whose design assumes an active visitor instead of a passive recipient.
Falk and Storksdieck (2005) extended this thinking into a model that explains why an identical exhibition produces different learning in different people. Their Contextual Model of Learning holds that learning in free-choice settings emerges from three interacting contexts. The personal context covers prior knowledge, interest, motivation, and the visitor's own reason for coming. A sociocultural context covers who the visitor came with and what was said within that group. The physical context covers orientation, design, and what the visitor encounters afterward that reinforces the experience or contradicts it. Testing the model against visitors to a science center exhibition Falk and Storksdieck found that no single factor predicted learning and that a visitor's prior knowledge and interest shaped outcomes at least as strongly as the exhibition's own design did. The most consequential finding for practice is that learning is cumulative and continues well after a visit ends, which means an isolated program with nothing reinforcing it has been designed to be forgotten.
Mayer (2004) addresses a narrower question with considerably more precision, asking how people learn from material that combines words and pictures. The Cognitive Theory of Multimedia learning rests on three claims drawn from cognitive psychology. The first is that information is processed through two separate channels, verbal and visual. The second is that each channel has strictly limited capacity at any given moment. Lastly, that meaningful learning requires the learner to actively select, organize, and integrate material rather than absorb it. From these claims Mayer derives design principles grouped by what they accomplish, including reducing processing that is extraneous to the goal, managing the processing that is essential by segmenting content at a pace learner controls, and fostering deeper engagement through conversational rather than formal narration. Reviewing three decades of the theory's development, Mayer observes that its core principles have held up across changing media while their boundary conditions continue to be refined. For anyone producing video, this is the most immediately actionable theory in the set, because it specifies what to cut.
Wiggins and McTighe (20025) supply the procedure. Their framework, known as backward design, argues that most instruction is planned in the wrong order. Most instructions begin with activities and materials, and only afterward asks what participants were supposed to take away. They invert the sequence into three stages. The first is to identify the desired results, meaning the understanding that should survive long after the details fade. The second is to determine what would count as acceptable evidence that these understandings were reached. The very last thing, Wiggins and McTighe argue, is to plan the activities. They further argue that understanding is not one thing, but has six facets. Among them are the ability to explain, interpret, apply, shift perspective, empathize, and reflect on the limits of one's own knowledge. An activity that asks only for recall has therefore not assessed understanding at all.
The CAST (2024) Universal Design for Learning guidelines address who a design actually serves. UDL begins from the position that variability among learners is the norm rather than the exception, and that anything built for an average learner is disabling by design. Its three principles are multiple means of engagement (which concerns why a learner participates), multiple means of representation (which concerns how information is presented), and multiple means of action and expression (which concerns how a learner shows what they know). Version 3.0 sharpens the framework’s attention to learner agency, and to the ways design choices quietly reproduce exclusion. In practice, UDL is what turns captions, transcripts, and alternative response formats from accommodations added at the end into requirements settled at the beginning.
Simon (2010) addresses the collaborative half of this competency. Her framework for participatory cultural institutions sorts projects by how much control the institution keeps. Contributory projects invite visitors to supply limited material to a process the institution directs. Collaborative projects make visitors active partners in something the institution still controls. Co-creative projects define goals together with community members from the start. Hosted projects supply space and resources for a group pursuing its own purposes. Simon’s central practical argument is that participation has to be scaffolded rather than merely offered, and that good participatory design moves people from individual engagement toward social engagement instead of assuming that shift will happen on its own.
Friedman (2008), editing a framework developed for the National Science Foundation, supplies the evaluation vocabulary the other theories lack. The framework names the categories in which an informal education project can claim impact, including awareness and knowledge, engagement and interest, attitude, behavior, and skills. It insists a project declare which of these it intends to affect before it begins. It also separates evaluation by timing, distinguishing front-end evaluation before design, formative evaluation during development, remedial evaluation after launch, and summative evaluation of outcomes. Its governing discipline is that intended outcomes must be stated in terms that could actually be measured, which rules out the comfortable claim that a program raised awareness.
Why It Matters to the Profession
Information institutions have spent several decades shifting from defining themselves by what they hold to defining themselves by what they enable. That shift makes instructional capability a core professional skill rather than a specialization held by a few people on staff. An archive that digitizes a collection and publishes it online has not thereby educated anyone. Access is a precondition for learning, not a substitute for it, and the distance between the two is closed by design work or not at all.
This matters most sharply where attendance is voluntary. A classroom teacher whose lesson is badly sequenced still has the same students tomorrow. A museum, an archive, or a channel that loses a visitor's attention has usually lost it for good, and generally has no way of learning why. The theories above earn their place precisely because they let a professional reason about the failure in advance rather than infer it from attendance figures afterwards.
There is also an equity dimension, which the UDL framework states outright. When a program is built for an imagined typical participant, everyone outside that imagined norm is excluded by the design itself, rather than by any decision anyone consciously made. For example, a video published without captions excludes viewers for deaf or hard of hearing, viewers whose first language is not english, and viewers watching somewhere sound is impractical and it does so silently. Designing for variability from the outset is what separates an institution serving the public from one serving the portion of the public that happens to resemble its assumptions.
For me, this competency joins two strands of my background that had previously run separately. My undergraduate degree is in social sciences with a minor in psychology, which gave me an early grounding in how people process and retain information. My professional work in digital asset management, creative asset management, and executive administration was instructional work that nobody labeled as such. Every system I documented and every process I handed off required deciding what a colleague genuinely needed to understand rather than what I could simply tell them, and required accepting that a procedure no one could follow was a procedure I had designed badly. What the MLIS supplied was the vocabulary and the theoretical basis to do that deliberately instead of by instinct
Designing Learning Experiences in a Particular Information Environment
My particular information environment is the archive and the moving image collection. Nearly all of the learning that happens in those environments is free choice. The audience is made up of researchers, students, educators, and members of the public who arrive voluntarily. They all carry wildly different prior knowledge, and are under no obligations to stay.
Designing for that environment begins, following Wiggins and McTighe (2005), with deciding what a particular participant should still understand once the details have gone, and only then choosing a format. The order matters especially in moving image work, because archival footage is compelling enough to feel self-justified. This mistakenly invites designers to build the experience first, and attach an educational purpose to do it afterwards.
The Contextual Model then determines what has to surround that content. Falk and Storksdieck (2005) found that a single encounter is a weak instrument. So, archival programming should be built to be reinforced whether through accompanying written material, a follow-up activity, or a companion event that lets a visitor meet the material again in a different register. Their findings also established that the social dimension is not ornamental. Creating an occasion for visitors to talk with one another about what they have just seen is a design decision with measurable consequences for what they retain.
For material delivered as video, Mayer's (2024) principles govern how the thing is built internally. First, it should have segmented contents so the viewer controls pace. Next, cutting material that is interesting but extraneous to the stated understanding. Lastly, speaking to the viewer conversationally rather than formally. The CAST (2024) guidelines govern who can reach it, making captions, transcripts, and (where resources allow) translation. These should all be conditions of the design rather than later additions. Simon's (2010) framework determines whether an audience is invited to participate, and at what level of institutional control. Friedman's (2008) framework requires that intended impact be stated in advance and in measurable terms, so that a program can eventually be evaluated rather than merely described.
Evidence 1
The first piece of evidence demonstrating my mastery of Competency K is the video essay How Snow White Went from 'Disney's Folly' to Animation Legend, and its accompanying instructional materials. This first episode is from an independent series I produce on the feature films of Walt Disney Studios. I researched, wrote, narrated, edited, and published it on my own time. It went live on January 16, 2025.
Link: https://www.mickaylamcdowell.com/videos/snowwhite
Description of the Artifact
This artifact is a published video essay together with the instructional materials built around it, and it has four connected parts.
The first part is a full narration script tracing the production history of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, organized into discrete thematic sections covering the studio’s position in the early 1930s, the selection and adaptation of the Grimm source material, animator training and character development, the influence of German Expressionist cinema on the film's visual design, the technical innovations of rotoscoping and the multiplane camera, the studio’s production and approval workflow, and the film's release and legacy.
The second is the video itself, which I produced in full. I perform the narration, sourced and assembled the visual reference material drawn from the film, from contemporaneous work including Metropolis and Nosferatu, from archival production footage, and from the illustrated sources that shaped the film's art direction. Additionally, I edited the finished piece so that each visual example arrives at the point in the narration it illustrates. The on-screen presenter is a VTuber model, meaning an animated character rig whose expressions and movements are driven in real time by my own voice and performance. This gives the video a consistent, visible host rather than narration over footage alone.
The third is an "Inspiration” section documenting the reasoning behind the project before any of it was built. It examines audience data for video platforms, reviews published accounts of archival outreach including Iowa State University’s digitization channel, and compares the reach of raw archival uploads against edited original content. It closes with specific design recommendations for an archive considering this kind of work, including toggleable closed captions, captions in additional languages where resources allow, the re-cutting of long-form material into short-form segments, and the use of a VTuber presenter to make complex material more approachable and to establish recognizable identity across formats.
The fourth is a set of educational activities differentiated across four grade bands from kindergarten through 12th grade. Research for the project drew on scholarly and archival sources, among them from the Library of Congress preservation essay on the film, the Indianapolis Museum of Art volume on its making, and the Disney Archives’ own production footage.
Justification and Connection to the Competency
This artifact demonstrates the competency most clearly through its design rationale, which is written down rather than merely implied. The “Inspiration” section is an audience and context analysis performed before any content existed. It identifies the intended audience, establishes that educational content performs well on the chosen platform, and then makes the argument that separates this project from its comparison case–Iowa State University, Iowa State's channel published unedited archival footage and reached a modest audience, while edited, narratively structured original content reached a far larger one. That is a conclusion about the conditions under which a voluntary audience will engage, and it is what determined that the project would be a video essay rather than a collection of uploaded clips. In the terms Falk and Storksdieck (2005) use, I was reasoning about the personal context, asking what would bring a free-choice viewer to this material and hold them there, rather than assuming the subject's historical importance would supply the motivation by itself.
The same section demonstrates the accessibility dimension of the competency. My argument that the video should carry toggleable captions, and that additional languages should follow where an institution can afford them, is an application of the principle of multiple means of representation set out in the CAST (2024) guidelines. I treated captioning as a requirement determined during planning rather than as an accommodation to be added later if time allowed, which is exactly the distinction UDL draws. Additionally, the proposal to re-cut long-form content for short-form platforms applies the same logic to engagement, creating several routes into identical content for audiences who will not commit to an hour.
The clearest demonstration of theory-driven design in this artifact is that the “Inspiration” section proposes the VTuber presenter and the finished video implements it. Having argued in writing that an animated host would make specialist material feel more approachable and would establish a consistent identity a returning viewer could recognize, I then built the video that way. Mayer’s (2024) framework supports the distinction I was reaching for. A static image of a speaker adds little to learning, but an on-screen presenter that gestures and expresses in coordination with human narration supports it, and Mayer's voice principle holds that a human voice outperforms a synthetic one. A rig synchronized live to my own performance sits precisely on that line. It is neither a still portrait nor a machine reading a script, but an expressive presenter driven by a real voice. Producing the video also meant applying Mayer’s other principles as editing decisions rather than as abstractions. Sourcing visual reference and cutting it against the narration is the concrete work of coordinating the verbal and visual channels, and deciding what footage to leave out is the concrete work of removing material that is interesting but extraneous to the point being made.
The script itself reflects constructivist design in Hein’s (1995) sense. It is built as a series of self-contained thematic sections rather than as one continuous chronology, which means a viewer can enter wherever their existing interest already lies, whether in animation technique, film history, or fairy tale adaptation. They can still get something coherent. The script also works repeatedly to attach unfamiliar material to knowledge a general viewer is likely to already hold, as when the forest sequence is explained through its kinship with Metropolis and Nosferatu. That is the constructivist premise applied directly, since new understanding is built by fastening it to something the learner already has.
The tiered activity set shows that I designed for a defined range of learners rather than one imagined participant. The kindergarten through 3rd grade activities ask students to make and describe, the 4th through 6th grade activities ask them to recreate and argue, the 7th through 9th grade activities ask them to compare and analyze, and the 10th through 12th grade activities ask them to evaluate artistic influence and construct an argument from evidence. Each band offers more than one way to respond, including making, writing, debating, and presenting. This applies the principle of multiple means of action and expression in CAST (2024).
More broadly, this artifact demonstrates that I can carry out the full arc of instructional design without an assignment prompt directing any part of it. As independent work, it required me to identify the need, select the theoretical basis, build the product, and publish it under my own name. That is the same sequence an archivists would follow in proposing educational content to an institution, performed without the scaffolding a course provides.
Evidence 2
The second piece of evidence demonstrating my mastery of Competency K is the video essay Unpacking Pinocchio: Animation, Morality, and Disney’s Early Genius, and its accompanying activity set. The second episode of the same independent series as Evidence 1, it was published on July 29, 2025.
Link: https://www.mickaylamcdowell.com/videos/unpackingpinocchio
Description of the Artifact
This artifact is the second published episode of my independently published series, produced to the same specification as Evidence 1. It consists of a narration script covering the production of Pinocchio organized into sections on the studios position following Snow White, the adaptation of Collodi’s source novel, character development, the voice cast, innovations in animation, the film score, production delays and cost overruns, and the film's reception and legacy. As with the first episode, I performed the narration, sourced and assembled the visual reference material, edited the video, and hosted it through the same live-synced VTuber model. It is accompanied by a revised educational activities set spanning kindergarten through 12th grade, in which each grade band now opens with the stated learning objective, and by a full reference list of published sources consulted, including Kaufman’s production history and Kothenschulte’s archival volume.
Justification and Connection to the Competency
I selected this artifact because it demonstrates something the first cannot, which is iterative design driven by theory rather than by preference. The instructional apparatus was restructured between the two episodes in two specific ways, and both changes are theoretically motivated.
The more substantial change is the addition of an explicit learning objective at the head of each grade band, such as “explore character development and animation as storytelling” for grades three through five and “critically evaluate artistic decisions, production challenges, and legacy” for grades nine through twelve. This is backward design as Wiggins and McTighe (2005) describe it. In the first episode, activities were generated first and the educational purpose was visible only in the aggregate. In the second, the desired result was stated first, and the activities were then built to reach it. This is precisely the inversion the framework prescribes. The objectives also track the facets of understanding Wiggins and McTighe identify, moving from explanation in the lower bands toward interpretation, application, and perspective-taking in the upper ones, where students argue from an assigned position in the adaptation debate and construct an evaluative thesis in the film critique essay.
The second change is the grade banding itself. The Snow White activities were divided K-3, 4-6, 7-9, and 10-12. The Pinocchio activities were redivided K-2, 3-5, 6-8, and 9-12, aligning them to the conventional divisions of the American school system rather than to bands I had set on my own judgement. That revision came from recognizing that an instructional product meant for classroom use has to map onto structures teachers actually work within, or else the labor of adaptation falls to the educator and the materials simply go unused.
This artifact also demonstrates my ability to design for collaborative, as well as individual learning (which is the first half of the competency statement). The video is an individual experience, watched alone at the viewer’s own pace. The activity set converts the same content into collaborative ones, including the small-group ethics debate in which students are assigned incompatible positions as a Collodi purist, a Disney animator, and a modern audience member, or the gallery walk in which students rotate through stations on multiplane camera work, rotoscoping, and effect animation before choosing one technique to research and present. Building these required recognizing, in the terms Simon (2010) sets out, that participation has to be scaffolded rather than simply invited. Assigning students specific and opposing roles, instead of opening the floor to discussion, is what makes the debate actually produce the perspective-taking it is meant to produce.
The production itself reflects Mayer’s (2024) principles as a set of working constraints rather than as commentary. The script is segmented into numbered sections with consistent framing, which supports learner-controlled pacing instead of demanding unbroken attention for 30 minutes. The narration is conversational and addresses the viewer directly, corresponding to the personalization and voice principles Mayer identifies as fostering deeper processing. Additionally, it is delivered in my own voice through an expressive presenter rather than as a disembodied commentary. The extended comparison between Lampwick’s transformation and the 1931 Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde required me to source footage from both films, and cut them against one another at the exact points the narration draws the parallel. This is the coordination of verbal and visual channels the theory's dual-channel assumption calls for, executed as an editing decision rather than described as a principle.
Retaining the same presenter, voice, structure, and instructional apparatus across both episodes is itself a design choice with a theoretical basis. Falk and Storksdieck (2005) found that learning in free-choice settings is cumulative and builds across encounters rather than completing within one. A series a viewer can recognize on site, and whose episodes behave the same way, is built to accrue across repeat viewing in a way that a set of unconnected videos is not.
More broadly, this artifact shows that I treat instructional design as something to be revised against evidence rather than settled once. The changes between the two episodes were not stylistic. Each address a specific weakness in the first design, and each can be explained by reference to a principle rather than to taste.
Evidence 3
The third piece of evidence demonstrating my mastery of Competency J is my annotated bibliography on remote and virtual users, completed in INFO 284-17: Reference and Information Services in Archives (Spring 2024). This assignment required identifying and critically evaluating scholarly literature addressing a specific user population assessing both the contributions and the methodological limitations of each source.
Description of the Artifact
The guide is a four section professional resource on grant-funded film restoration. Section 1 introduces the grant lifecycle, covering how to identify an appropriate funder, how to manage an awarded project, and how to evaluate outcomes. Section 2 profiles specific funders including the National Film Preservation Foundation and the National Endowment for Humanities, with award ranges and eligibility requirements, and surveys alternative sources including the Council on Library and Information Resources’ Recordings at Risk program. Section 3 offers guidance on grant writing drawn from published scholarship.
Section 4 is the portion most relevant here. It develops an extended public programming proposal built around the UCLA Film and Television Archive’s 2023 restoration of The Phantom of the Opera 1925, consisting of three integrated components. The first is a screening of the restored print with live orchestral accompaniment. Then the second is a post-screening panel titled “Preserving the Phantom” that would bring together a restoration head, a silent film historian, a cinema makeup historian, and a representative from the music department that produced the new score. Lastly there would be a companion museum exhibition drawing on the Hammer Museum's permanent collection. The section closes with an analysis of the project's intended educational and community impact.
Justification and Connection to the Competency
I selected this artifact, because it demonstrates the competency in a professional and institutional setting rather than a public-facing media one. Section 4 is a fully designed collaborative learning experience rather than a description of one.
The three-part programming plan applies the Contextual Model of Learning (Falk & Storksdieck, 2005) across all three of its contexts, and does so structurally rather than by coincidence. The screening addresses the physical context, reconstructing the conditions of silent-era exhibition with live accompaniment so that encountering the restored print is an experience rather than a viewing. The panel addresses the sociocultural context, putting an archivist, a historian, a makeup specialist, and a musician in conversation so that the audience sees preservation as a set of contested decisions rather than a settled technical procedure. The exhibition addresses the personal context by offering several thematic entry points, including the mask as a metaphor, identity and outsiderhood in 20th century art, early Hollywood horror aesthetics, and theatricality in American visual culture, so that visitors arriving with different prior interests each have a way in. Most importantly, the three components reinforce one another, which responds directly to Falk and Storksdieck’s finding that learning is cumulative and that isolated encounters produce very little that lasts.
The exhibition design specifically reflects Hein’s (1995) constructivist museum. The plan prescribes no single path through the material, offers a range of object types including portraiture, prints, film stills, lobby cards, and multimedia kiosks comparing original footage against the restoration. It supplies several modes of engagement rather than one. The kiosks matter particularly, because they let a visitor see for themselves what restoration changed and build their own understanding of the work, rather than accept a wall label's assertion of it.
The artifact’s clearest demonstration of applied theory is the “Educational and Community Impact” section, which states intended outcomes in advance and in categories corresponding closely to those set out in Friedman (2008). Access and engagement addresses engagement and interest. Interdisciplinary learning addresses knowledge and understanding. Workforce development, through student involvement in music, archival research, and exhibition design, addresses skills. The final category proposes documenting and evaluating outcomes explicitly as a model for future proposals. Section 1 reinforces this by arguing that evaluation strategies belong in the initial project plan rather than being added retroactively, It names specific instruments including pre- and post-program surveys, demographic analysis, and citation tracking. This is the discipline the NSF framework insists on, which is that a project declares what it intends to change, and how anyone would recognize the change before the work begins.
The guide is also an instructional product in its own right, built for an audience of adult practitioners. Its organization into four sections moving from orientation through funder selection, from writing technique to fully worked example, its glossing of specialist terms (such as orphan films for readers outside the preservation field), and its resource list allowing a reader to continue independently all reflect deliberate decisions about how a working professional would actually use the document. Providing the same material in several forms, so that a reader seeking a quick reference to award ranges and a reader seeking a full-worked model are both served, applies the principle of multiple means of representation from CAST (2024) to a professional rather than a classroom audience.
More broadly, this artifact demonstrates that I can design learning at institutional scale and inside real constraints. A public program that has to be funded, staffed, scheduled, and justified to a grantor is a harder design problem than one built without those limits. The guide shows that I can hold the educational purpose steady, while working within those limitations.
Conclusion
Taken together, these artifacts demonstrate that I design learning experiences from a theoretical foundation rather than by intuition, and that I can do so across more than one kind of information environment. The Snow White materials show design that begins from an analysis of a voluntary audience, and builds accessibility in as a requirement rather than an afterthought. The Unpacking Pinocchio materials show that same design revised through a second iteration, with stated objectives introduced ahead of activities and collaborative structures scaffolded so they produce a greater understanding. The Grant Funding Guide shows the same capability at institutional scale, designing a multi-part public program whose components reinforce one another and whose intended impacts are specified in measurable terms before anything is run. What holds across all three is that the design decisions can be explained, and that each explanation rests on a principle rather than a preference.
In my future career I expect to apply this competency directly in archival, media, and cultural heritage settings. Where collections increasingly reach the public through programming, digital exhibits, and produced content rather than through the reading room alone. In that work, the ability to state what an audience should understand before deciding what to build, to design for the full range of people who will encounter the material rather than for an imagined typical visitor, and to specify how a program's impact will be assessed are the things that separate outreach that changes what people know from outreach that merely happens. I also expect the video essay work to continue, and each new episode is an opportunity to test a design decision against an audience I cannot control.
The settings in which people encounter archival material keep changing, as such staying current will remain an ongoing part of my professional development. I will follow the Center for Advancement of Informal Science Education, which maintains informalscience.org and publishes the evaluation frameworks and reports that govern practice in free-choice learning environments (including the NSF framework cited here). I will monitor CAST’s Universal Design for Learning Guidelines, which are revised periodically, and which set the accessibility standard I intend to hold my own work to. I will read the Journal of Museum Education, published by the Museum Education Roundtable, which addresses interpretive and instructional practice in cultural institutions specifically. Finally, I will participate in the Society of American Archivists’ Reference, Access and Outreach Section, which takes up education programming and public engagement within archival practice. Continued engagement with these resources will let me keep refining my design practice as the research and the settings both continue to develop.
Note on the Use of Generative Artificial Intelligence
Artificial intelligence (Anthropic, 2026) was used in preparing this essay to help identify relevant scholarly literature, to suggest the essay’s organizational structure, and to check grammar and APA formatting. All writing, evidence selection, and analysis are my own.
References
Anthropic. (2026). Claude (Opus 5) [Large language model]. https://claude.ai
CAST. (2024). Universal design for learning guidelines version 3.0. https://udlguidelines.cast.org
Falk, J. H., & Storksdieck, M. (2005). Using the contextual model of learning to understand visitor learning from a science center exhibition. Science Education, 89(5), 744–778. https://doi-org.libaccess.sjlibrary.org/10.1002/sce.20078
Friedman, A. J. (Ed.). (2008). Framework for evaluating impacts of informal science education projects. National Science Foundation. https://informalscience.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/Eval_Framework.pdf
Hein, G. E. (1995). The constructivist museum. Journal for Education in Museums, 16, 21–23.
Mayer, R. E. (2024). The past, present, and future of the cognitive theory of multimedia learning. Educational Psychology Review, 36(1), Article 8. https://doi-org.libaccess.sjlibrary.org/10.1007/s10648-023-09842-1
Simon, N. (2010). The participatory museum. Museum 2.0. https://participatorymuseum.org/read/
Wiggins, G., & McTighe, J. (2005). Understanding by design (Expanded 2nd ed.). Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development. https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/sjsu/detail.action?docID=3002118
