Journal of Student Research 2015

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Foreword

Viewing the drafts of cover art for this issue brought to mind lines from a popular children’s hymn: “All creatures bright and beautiful / All crea tures great and small.” As we prepared to bring Volume XIV of the UW-Stout Journal of Student Research to press, I was struck by the range of subjects and topics that are worthy of study. The orbs on our cover suggest rugged sub jects of an astronomic nature, and the delicate symmetry of an aster blossom. In this volume of the JSR, we offer up a sampling of the inquisitive, intuitive, credible, and meaningful research taking place across our campus; it is gratifying to see the range of fields represented. Strangely, over the life of this journal, this range hasn’t occurred with a pancake-level uniformity from across the board, but rather has come in groups and clusters, peaks and valleys, that shift from year to year to create a less uniform, but no less interesting landscape of knowledge to survey. This year, for instance, we find three different investigations of the same ephemeral pond ecology (ephemer al—now who would have thought to research something ‘ephemeral’?), while a surprising number of submissions address small parts of practical economic questions. It makes one wonder what is in store for Volume XV! Readers will find a number of articles of relevance to a university community, asking questions of underage drinking, foreign student expe rience, and how students manage debt; in at least one case, the curiosity prompting a study had its seeds in a study abroad experience, and there is one study that puts the JSR itself under the microscope! In last year’s volume we began to note, where we were aware, of research that was supported by programs originating on or off campus: Research Services, Honors College, the McNair Scholars. We do so again this year, joining the authors in gratitude for the support those programs have provided. I must also express my gratitude to the individuals and groups on the UW-Stout campus that have assisted in making the JSR a success. Many are listed on the following pages: faculty advisors who mentor the student authors through the process, faculty reviewers who serve as peer reviewers of the content (and who often go to great lengths to help the authors main tain rigorous standards of research and theory), the Research Services staff, including Kaitlyn Suda’s early-stage help, the Cross-Media Graphics Manage ment teams, and new this year, invaluable editing and proofreading help from Dr. Kate Edenborg’s Editing Processes and Practices class. We hope you will be as pleased to read this volume as we are excited to present it.

Peter Reim Editor