A Qualitative Study of the Motivating Factors, Perceptions, and Experiences of Mentors Involved with Elementary Students During In-school and After-school Programs

This qualitative study focused on the thoughts, attitudes, and opinions of mentors working with elementary age students. Volunteers were taken for the study from two mentoring programs; an academically based tutoring program which took place during the school day and a more relationally oriented program involving teens working with students after school. Both programs took place in a public school with a high percentage of economically disadvantaged children. Participants were asked questions about their perceptions of student needs, their successes with their individual mentee(s), the strength of the program they were involved in, and about their personal thoughts and opinions on their experience. These results have been extrapolated into further insights and suggestions for continued success and for building greater effectiveness into mentoring programs. Suggestions include ideas on recruiting and training mentors, greater communication between mentors and teachers, and developing longer term relationships between mentors and students

Photography-based taxonomy is inadequate, unnecessary, and potentially harmful for biological sciences

The question whether taxonomic descriptions naming new animal species without type specimen(s) deposited in collections should be accepted for publication by scientific journals and allowed by the Code has already been discussed in Zootaxa (Dubois & Nemésio 2007; Donegan 2008, 2009; Nemésio 2009a–b; Dubois 2009; Gentile & Snell 2009; Minelli 2009; Cianferoni & Bartolozzi 2016; Amorim et al. 2016). This question was again raised in a letter supported by 35 signatories published in the journal Nature (Pape et al. 2016) on 15 September 2016. On 25 September 2016, the following rebuttal (strictly limited to 300 words as per the editorial rules of Nature) was submitted to Nature, which on 18 October 2016 refused to publish it. As we think this problem is a very important one for zoological taxonomy, this text is published here exactly as submitted to Nature, followed by the list of the 493 taxonomists and collection-based researchers who signed it in the short time span from 20 September to 6 October 2016