Ten Salient Practices of Undergraduate Research Mentors: A Review of the Literature

This paper identifies salient practices of faculty mentors of undergraduate research (UR) as indicated in the extensive literature of the past two decades on UR. The well-established benefits for students involved in UR are dependent, first and foremost, on high-quality mentoring. Mentorship is a defining feature of UR. As more and different types of colleges and universities strive to meet student demand for authentic scholarly experiences, it is imperative to identify what effective UR mentors do in order to ensure student engagement, quality enhancement, retention, and degree-completion. We offer an original analysis of the literature on UR mentoring in which we identify 10 significant “lessons learned,” or evidence-based practices of effective UR mentors that apply broadly across disciplines, students, institutions, and mentoring approaches.     

Philosophy: A Special Place in the Liberal Arts

Abstract

A comprehensive model of the dynamics of one-on-one teaching is described. Adoption of specific teaching styles is influenced by the learning styles of students; the interest in faculty to build interpersonal relationships with learners; teacher need to control the task; the capability of students; and situational constraints. In clinical settings, thesis work, and other areas, faculty preferred the use of Personal Model, Facilitator, and Delegator teaching styles. Relative to classroom teaching, these styles were used more frequently and the Expert and Formal Authority Styles were less prominent. This is consistent with the goals of one-on-one teaching to develop the ability of learners to work independently.     

Peer development as an alternative to peer observation: a tool to enhance professional development

Many higher education institutions worldwide require that all academic staff undergo a peer observation of teaching each academic year. Within one department in a university in the South of England, questions have arisen about the value and purpose of the traditional ‘peer observation’ process, and as a result a new voluntary system of ‘peer development’ has been introduced. This paper explains the rationale underpinning the new peer development process, and explores its worth and value to those who have participated in it as a mechanism for professional development. Reflections on the process are considered, along with what can be done to improve the new system.     

Peer Mentoring Styles and Their Contribution to Academic Success Among Mentees: A Person-Oriented Study in Higher Education

The purpose of our study was to explore peer mentoring styles and examine their contribution to academic success among mentees. Data were collected as part of a comprehensive evaluation of a peer mentoring program. The sample consisted of 49 mentors (advanced students) who supported 376 mentees (first year students) in small groups. Indicators for peer mentoring styles were constructed using mentee assessments of mentoring functions and mentor quality, and unobtrusive data gathered in an analysis of online mentoring activities and a content analysis of the quality of the online mentoring activities. Using cluster analyses, three distinct mentoring styles were identified: Motivating master mentoring, informatory standard mentoring, and negative minimalist mentoring. Motivating master mentors were shown to have a positive influence on success in the mentoring program among those mentees who failed two preliminary exams. Implications for the training of peer mentors in higher education are discussed.     

Peer Mentoring: A Citizenship Entitlement at Tanfield School

This paper describes the experience and benefits of peer led education at Tanfield School and how this led to the development of a peer mentoring scheme in the school, which was linked to citizenship education. The project aimed to strengthen existing links and ease the transition of pupils from feeder primary schools to the secondary school. The second aim was to improve the key skills of the mentors and have an impact on their learning. The project involved year 10 older students mentoring pupils in year 7. The findings of the evaluation are reported and it is argued that the aims were met.     

Peer Mentoring: A Citizenship Entitlement at Tanfield School

This paper describes the experience and benefits of peer led education at Tanfield School and how this led to the development of a peer mentoring scheme in the school, which was linked to citizenship education. The project aimed to strengthen existing links and ease the transition of pupils from feeder primary schools to the secondary school. The second aim was to improve the key skills of the mentors and have an impact on their learning. The project involved year 10 older students mentoring pupils in year 7. The findings of the evaluation are reported and it is argued that the aims were met.     

Peer tutoring in algebra: A study in Middle school

Abstract

This study reports the academic benefits of peer tutoring in algebra for middle school students. A total of 380 students enrolled in grades 7^th and 8^th participated in the study. Two peer tutoring sessions took place during each week (10?weeks). Interactions between peers lasted 20 to 25?minutes for each session. The typology of tutoring was fixed and same-age. A pretest posttest with control group design was used. Statistical significant improvements were reported in the academic achievement variable after the implementation of the peer tutoring program for 7^th and 8^th grade courses separately and altogether. Over 87% of the students in the experimental group improved their marks. The overall effect size for the experience was reported to be medium (Hedge’s g?=?0.48). The main conclusion of this study is that fixed and same-age peer tutoring in algebra may be very beneficial for middle school students.     

Creating a Space to Learn: A Classroom of Fun,Interaction, and Trust

Abstract. By creating a space for fun, interaction, and trust, teachers and students together can build a learning environment that promotes engagement, deep learning, and meaning. Such a space emphasizes process, not product, personalizes learning, and contributes to whole person development. To facilitate the creation of this space, the teachers show respect for students as individuals, encourage original thinking, and expand the boundaries of the classroom through field trips and guest speakers, and the students share written reflections on critical issues that link to personal experience and conviction, contribute to dynamic class dialogues, and develop and present creative responses to environmental and social complexities.     

应用型本科院校新文科建设的设计与实践——以唐山学院文法学院为例

应用型本科院校占我国高等教育的半壁江山,加快应用型本科院校新文科建设、促进应用型本科院校文科良性发展对于建设高质量教育体系意义重大。应用型本科院校新文科建设要把握文科教育的价值属性,强化价值引领;要将知识逻辑转化为能力逻辑,构建应用型且具有时代性和地方特色的人才培养体系;要以开放的心态,重塑文科教育生态圈,构建多主体多场域协同的育人机制。     

Moving beyond face value: re-envisioning higher education evaluation as a generator of professional knowledge

Conventional student-led evaluation is now an orthodox feature of the North American, UK and Australian higher education landscape. Increasingly, it is guiding major institutional decisions around educational quality, academic promotion and more recently institutional funding by government. Yet significant research around student-led evaluation has demonstrated that this form of student opinion-based evaluation remains highly fragile and susceptible to multiple forms of influence. This paper argues that student-led evaluation of itself is not sufficiently robust to appropriately inform notions of educational quality or pedagogical capability of academics. An alternative approach to evaluation in higher education is proposed, broadly drawing on the conception of fourth generation evaluation. The model foregrounds academic collaboration in shaping a professional evaluative framework at an activity level (i.e. programme or sub-discipline level) based on an ongoing dialogue between peers and with students, as well as qualitative evaluation of student learning. The model attempts to make tensions and conflicts in the teaching and learning context more explicit and the active focus of evaluative efforts to devise appropriate and sustainable responses to improve the quality of learning and professional practice. This paper presents some preliminary research on the effectiveness of this model in its initial piloting in postgraduate programmes in an Australian university.     

Characteristics and Correlates of Supportive Peer Mentoring: A Mixed Methods Study

In this mixed methods study, we employed thematic analysis (TA) to examine peer mentors’ perceptions of benefits, challenges, and roles they experienced as mentors, as well as benefits and challenges experienced by first-year college students. We also utilized quantitative student ratings to classify mentors as highly, moderately, or minimally supportive in order to determine whether any subthemes from the TA appeared more or less frequently across the three groups. Highly supportive mentors reported greater camaraderie among their seminar students and fewer unmotivated students, but also fewer opportunities to provide support to students. Moreover, mentors’ and students’ perceptions in the minimally supportive group were discrepant; mentors in this group consistently reported providing more support than was perceived by mentees.     

Learning from Reciprocal Peer Observation: A collaborative self-study

Engaging in a self-study is a multi-faceted activity that involves not only autobiography and theory, but also students and colleagues. Learning from and with colleagues can take many forms. This article discusses the authors' experience with reciprocal classroom observation in a teacher education context. Peer observation supported our learning about our own teaching by providing suggestions for change and mutual reassurance. In this study we make connections between learning from each other, ourselves, our students and theories of teaching and learning. Specifically, we address what we learned about pedagogy in relation to missed opportunities, teacher-directedness and articulating purpose; about curriculum, in relation to balance and standards; about our students, in relation to their backgrounds as well as social tensions; and about ourselves as teachers and learners in relation to rapport, role modeling and collegiality. We demonstrate how peer observation can be a valuable component of ongoing professional development for tertiary teachers.     

Student–student mentoring for retention and engagement in distance education

This article argues that in the drive to develop e‐learning initiatives in distance learning, simpler ways of supporting students for retention may be overlooked; for example, the linking of students in the form of mentoring and peer support networks. The article reports on three mentoring projects, in the United Kingdom, Korea and New Zealand, and shows that apparent retention gains of up to 20% with a return on investment of the order of magnitude of several hundred per cent may be possible. Whilst accepting the limitations of these studies, the article argues that there needs to be a clearer understanding of the benefits of such initiatives when deciding to invest time and funding in distance education support. It suggests that there is still much mileage to be made out of mentoring and ‘study dating’.     

The STORRI Method: A Strategy for Exploring and Integrating Youth Culture into the Classroom

As teachers progress in life and career, generation gaps may begin to appear that decrease not only the effectiveness of interaction with students but also the ability to produce generationally relevant course content. Situated in a framework of socioculturalism (Vygotsky 1978), this article presents The STORRI Method—a strategy for exploring and integrating youth culture into the classroom. STORRI is an acronym for the six iterative steps of the method: survey, talk, observe, research, reflect, and integrate. Each step of The STORRI Method is discussed with numerous corresponding examples, and best practices are offered for use in the classroom setting. A case narrative is also provided to demonstrate The STORRI Method's use in a high school level U.S. government course.     

Non-diagnostic intelligent tutoring systems: Teaching without student models

The keystones of traditional intelligent tutoring systems (ITSs) have been complex procedures for student diagnosis and adaptive instruction based on diagnostic data. While some of these systems have been shown to be effective, they are also very expensive to develop. This paper describes another class of ITSs, non-diagnostic ITSs, which do little or no student diagnosis, and concentrate their intelligence in other areas. Intelligent features of non-diagnostic ITSs include: modeling of experts' reasoning processes and cognitive representations (often using graphic displays), coaching based on comparison of student and expert performance, and replays and summaries of student performance. While traditional diagnostic ITSs are usually intended to be used in a stand-alone fashion, non-diagnostic tutors are designed to facilitate collaborative learning among students and between teachers and students.This paper presents a framework for comparing the features of non-diagnostic and diagnostic tutors. A number of non-diagnostic and diagnostic ITSs are described, and data on the educational effectiveness of each type of ITS is presented along with estimates of the type and level of development work required for each. Finally, obstacles to wider use of non-diagnostic ITSs are discussed.     

大学英语合作写作过程中同伴间对话研究

合作型写作已在大学英语写作课堂中越来越受到重视和认可。通过对合写者间的互动对话进行定量和定性分析,探寻合写时合作者关注的主要问题有哪些以及解决这些问题的主要策略。研究结果表明,写作内容层面和语言层面的问题是合作者讨论关注的重点,这一点与写作者个体写作时的情况类似。面对合写时的认知冲突,合写者往往通过讨论协商,重建思维,解决分歧。同时,同伴间的互动往往促成"集体性语言建架"的形成,有利于同伴间的互相学习。     

“同学施教”模式个案研究

通过"同学施教"(PeeT Teaching),了解学生对该方法的认同感,探讨其能否激发学生的学习积极性和主观能动性,能否培养他们的自主学习能力和策略的使用能力,数据,访谈和观察结果显示:开展"同学施教"活动,调动了学生自主学习的积极性,培养了学生的合作精神和责任心,增强了学习自信心和自尊感,满足了学生的心理需求,提高了学生使用语言的能力,获得了使用学习策略的技巧.     

Student performativity in higher education: converting learning as a private space into a public performance

The paper sets out a conceptual analysis of student performativity in higher education as a mirror image of teacher performativity. The latter is well known and refers to targets, evaluations and performance indicators connected with the measurement of the teaching and research quality of university academics. The former is defined as the way that students are evaluated on the basis of how they perform at university in bodily, dispositional and emotional terms. Specifically, this includes rules on class attendance and assessment (‘presenteeism’), an increasing emphasis on participation in class and in groups as part of learning and assessment regimes (‘learnerism’) and the surveillance of students’ emotional development and values (‘soulcraft’). Student performativity is symbolic of the ‘performing self’ in wider society and is transforming learning at university from a private space into a public performance. This negatively impacts student rights to be free to learn as autonomous adults.     

Social work learning spaces: the Social Work Studio

This paper explores the contribution of a physical learning space to student engagement in social work education. Drawing on a constructivist methodology, this paper examines the findings of a survey conducted with students and staff in a social work and human service programme about their experiences of a Social Work Studio learning space. The analysis identified that students and staff who used the Studio reported that students were emotionally, cognitively and behaviourally engaged in the space, which enriched their development as social work and human service practitioners. The researchers concluded that the Social Work Studio is a useful tool for enhancing social work student engagement and increasing their confidence to address the ‘real-life’ challenges they may face as social work practitioners.     

Optimising the blended learning environment: the Arab Open University experience

This paper will offer some insights into possible ways to optimise the blended learning environment based on experience with this modality of teaching at Arab Open University/Jordan branch and also by reflecting upon the results of several meta-analytical studies, which have shown blended learning environments to be more effective than their face to face and online only counterparts. Three key elements will be presented as important ways for improving the blended learning environment: forging genuine collaborative partnerships between institutions in terms of the team-writing of Open and Distance Learning (ODL) material, adopting a more theoretically based instructional approach, such as the cognitive apprenticeship (CA) model, which emphasises making thinking visible and developing a comprehensive understanding of blended education in order to help students achieve their educational goals.