Search results

This study aims to examine the contribution of faculty–student coauthorship to the development of graduate students’ research skills in the sciences, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) by quantitatively assessing rubric-measured research skill gains over the course of an academic year compared to students who did not report participating in coauthorship with faculty mentors.

A quasi-experimental mixed methods approach was used to test the hypothesis that the influence of STEM graduate students’ mentored writing mentorship experiences would be associated with differential improvement in the development of their research skills over the course of an academic year.

The results indicate that students who co-authored with faculty mentors were likely to develop significantly higher levels of research skills than students who did not. In addition, less than half of the participants reported having such experiences, suggesting that increased emphasis on this practice amongst faculty could enhance graduate student learning outcomes.

Qualitative studies of graduate student writing experiences have alluded to outcomes that transcend writing quality per se and speak directly to the research skills acquired by the students as part of their graduate training. However, no study to date has captured the discrete effects of writing experiences on these skills in a quantifiable way.

Using the family activity of hobby stock-keeping (“petstock”) as a context, this paper aims to extend singularization theory to model the negotiations, agencies and resistances of children, parents and petstock, as they work through how animals become food within the boundaries of the family home. In doing so, the authors present an articulation of this process, deciphering the cultural biographies of petstock and leading to an understanding of the emergent array of child animal food-product preferences.

Data were collected from petstock-keeping parents through a mixture of ethnographic, in-depth interviewing and netnographic engagements in this qualitative, interpretive study; with parents offering experiential insights into animal meat and food-product socialization behaviours played out within the family environments.

The findings discuss the range of parental behaviours, motivations and activities vis-à-vis petstock, and their children’s responses, ranging from transgression to full compliance, in terms of eating home-raised animal food-products. The discussion illustrates that in the context of petstock, a precocious child food preference agency towards animal meat and food products is reported to emerge.

This research has empirical and theoretical implications for the understanding of the development of child food preference agency vis-à-vis animal food products in the context of family petstock keeping.

The research has the potential to inform policy makers around child education and food in regard to how child food preferences emerge and can inform marketers developing food-based communications aimed at children and parents.

Two original contributions are presented: an analysis of the under-researched area of how children’s food preferences towards eating animal food products develop, taking a positive child food-choice agency perspective, and a novel extension of singularization theory, theorizing the radical transformation, from animal to food, encountered by children in the petstock context.

As CD‐ROM becomes more and more a standard reference and technical support tool in all types of libraries, the annual review of this technology published in Computers in Libraries magazine increases in size and scope. This year, author Susan L. Adkins has prepared this exceptionally useful bibliography which she has cross‐referenced with a subject index.