Initial Characteristics and Mentoring Satisfaction of College Women Mentoring Youth: Implications for Training

Being a youth mentor is popular among college students, yet little is known about how their initial characteristics are related to mentoring satisfaction. Survey data from college women enrolled in a youth mentoring program (n = 158) and a comparison group (n = 136) were analyzed to determine how initial characteristics of youth mentors (a) differ from comparisons and (b) are associated with mentors’ satisfaction. Mentors reported higher autonomy, cultural sensitivity, and lower depression pre-participation than the comparison group, and their pre-participation GPA, cognitive empathy, and depression predicted post-participation mentoring satisfaction. Implications for mentor training are discussed.     

Investigating Patterns of Participation and Conversation Content in an Online Mentoring Program for Northern Canadian Youth

In this study, we describe participant characteristics, conversation content, and program success of an online mentoring program for northern Canadian youth. We investigate the associations between demographics and program success. The profiles and conversations of students and mentors that participated in the program between 2009 and 2013 were analyzed. Students were categorized into two groups (high and low engagement) based on the number of words written to their mentors. The high group contained proportionally more urban than rural students and equal proportions of Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal students, while the low group contained equal numbers of rural and urban students and proportionally more Aboriginal than non-Aboriginal students. This study provides valuable information on the use of online mentoring in northern communities.     

Efficacy of the Check & Connect Mentoring Program for At-Risk General Education High School Students

Although graduation rates are rising, the high school dropout problem remains a national crisis, and evidence-based information about interventions for at-risk students is critically needed. Prior research shows that Check & Connect, an individualized mentoring program, has positive effects on school persistence and progression for students with disabilities. This study examined the efficacy of Check & Connect with general education students who showed early warning signs of risk for dropping out of high school in a large urban district. The sample included 553 students with the lowest predicted probabilities of on-time graduation based on attendance, behavior, and course performance in Grades 8 and 9. Students were randomly assigned to receive a Check & Connect mentor for three years, starting in the summer after Grade 9, or not. Findings suggest the program was implemented with fidelity, except with students who left district schools. Check & Connect did not have any statistically significant impacts on measures of engagement, academic progress, the likelihood of dropping out, or graduation. These results are discussed in the context of other literature on mentoring and dropout prevention.     

Students' Self-Concept and Perceptions of Mentoring Relationships in a Summer Mentorship Program for Talented Adolescents

Mentoring is widely advocated as an educational experience for academically talented students because mentors may provide stimulation for academic growth and serve as positive role models for students in areas of career interest. This study examined the experiences of 72 talented teenagers attending a university-based summer mentorship program. Students completed pretest and posttest measures assessing self-concept and perceptions of research aptitude; they also shared their perceptions of their mentoring relationships in written journal entries. Results demonstrated increases in students' perceived research skills and job competence; students reported positive relationships with mentors, particularly when they felt that their mentor spent a great deal of time with them and was approachable, friendly, and engaging.     

Roles,Risks, and Benefits of Peer Mentoring Relationships in Higher Education

Successful peer mentoring in university settings is the result of relationships among students, mentors, and instructors. Findings from this study indicate that even in programs where training is ongoing and established, assumptions cannot be made about the understanding of the roles, risks, and benefits involved in such relationships. This study demonstrates that students, instructors, and mentors all have different perspectives about a mentor’s role and how that role should be enacted. Connecting link, peer leader, learning coach, student advocate, and trusted friend were identified as predominant roles enacted by mentors. Also described are risks and benefits for being or having a peer mentor.     

The Development and Design of a Framework to Match Mentees and Mentors Through a Systematic Review andThematic Analysis of Mentoring Programs Between 2000 and 2015

ABSTRACT

The need for longitudinal and holistic support of medical students throughout their training has led to the development of formal mentoring programs. Whilst success of formal mentoring programs has been attributed to (a) pairing mentees with trained and experienced mentors (matching), (b) the quality of mentoring interactions and (c) the presence of a nurturing environment, little attention has been attributed to establishing an effective matching process in medical school. We sought, in this review, to redress this gap within the context of matching medical students for mentoring. Modified PRISMA guidelines were followed to guide the review process. PubMed, ERIC, Cochrane Database, OVID and ScienceDirect databases were searched for articles on matching in medical schools and in allied health specialities published between 2000 and 2015.     

Positioning Mentoring as a Coach Development Tool: Recommendations for Future Practice and Research

Current thinking in coach education advocates mentoring as a development tool to connect theory and practice. However, little empirical evidence exists to evaluate the effectiveness of mentoring as a coach development tool. Business, education, and nursing precede the coaching industry in their mentoring practice, and research findings offered in these domains could be drawn upon to position mentoring as sports coaching development tool. Given the remote basis of some of mentor–coach relationships in sports coaching, additional learning can be drawn from mentoring conducted by virtual or electronic mediums. This article concludes with a series of reflective questions arising from research findings in other domains, designed to engage the potential coaching organization with the mentoring process.     

Year-Long Peer Mentoring Activity to Enhance the Retention of Freshmen STEM Students in a NSF Scholarship Program

The last year of a National Science Foundation (NSF) funded scholarship program was used to provide pseudo-formal peer mentoring activities to engineering, mathematics, and science undergraduates. A one-credit class was used to afford time for peer mentors and mentees to interact. During the fall semester, seniors augmented each week’s topics with personal experiences as to how they used the skill/topic that they had learned in their freshmen class in a future sophomore, junior or senior level course or on their co-op assignment. The last 10 min of every class were used for the seniors and freshmen to have an informal discussion. During the spring semester, the seniors served as an additional technical resource for the freshmen as they completed their class project. All participants found the one-credit class, project and peer mentoring activities beneficial to their education and would highly recommend the experience to incoming students.     

Personal Well-Being of Gifted Students Following Participation in an Early College-Entrance Program

In this study, life satisfaction and its correlates were explored through analysis of the experiences and psychological traits of highly gifted students who were accelerated into an early college-entrance program. Happiness, fulfillment in life, assuredness, and good dispositions are constructs that point toward positive character development and thriving. These early college entrants expressed greater global satisfaction with their lives than age peers. They specifically reported elevated levels of satisfaction in their achievements, immediate standard of living, personal safety, and future security than age peers. They expressed powerful feelings of general self-efficacy and high levels of trait seriousness, two constructs related to facilitating success. The findings in this study suggest these early college entrants are on a path toward personal thriving and living a good life.     

Interactivity Between Protégés and Scientists in an Electronic Mentoring Program

Interactivity is defined by Henri (1992) as a three-step process involving communication of information, a response to this information, and a reply to that first response. It is a key dimension of computer-mediated communication, particularly in the one-on-one communication involved in an electronic mentoring program. This report analyzes the interactivity between pairs of corporate research scientists (mentors) and university biology students (protégés) during two consecutive implementations of an electronic mentoring program. The frequency and structure of the interactions within each pair were examined to provide context: 542 messages were posted among the 20 mentors and 20 protégés. These messages were formed into 5–10 threads per pair, with 3–4 messages per thread, indicating a high level of interactivity (there were more responses posted than independent messages). Mentor–protégé pairs rated as effective by both mentors and protégés posted more messages overall, had well-structured threads, had protégé and mentor postings that were similar in topic coverage and message length, and had little overt “management” behavior by mentors. However, there appears to be no clear recipe for successful interaction. Not only are there a variety of factors at play in developing an online relationship in this context, but mentor–protégé pairs can falter at various stages in the process and in various ways.     

An analysis of three different approaches to student teacher mentoring and their impact on knowledge generation in practicum settings

Mentoring in Teacher Education is a key component in the professional development of student teachers. However, little research focuses on the knowledge shared and generated in mentoring conversations. In this paper, we explore the knowledge student teachers articulate in mentoring conversations under three different post-lesson approaches to mentoring: dialogue journaling, regular conferences and stimulated-recall conferences. Propositional discourse analysis identified 4534 propositions that were subsequently classified into four types of knowledge: recalls, appraisals, rules and artefacts along with the precision of arguments therein. Additionally, log-linear analyses were conducted to search for differences among the three mentoring approaches. The results indicate that dialogue journaling demonstrated more appraisals of practice, regular conferences emphasised rules and artefacts, and stimulated-recall favoured more precision in the type of the arguments stated. The three mentoring styles favour different but complementary understandings of practice and point to the impact of various approaches to mentoring on the sort of knowledge shared and generated in post-lesson mentoring conferences.     

Conceptions and Expectations of Mentoring Relationships in a Teacher Education Reform Context

Researchers indicate that prior experience and beliefs about learning and teaching held by practicing and pre-service teachers contribute significantly in shaping their mentoring relationships and, more broadly, their career outlook and aspirations. While mentoring is commonly seen as a form of support for pre-service teachers, mentoring can be pivotal in the creation of enabling environments in which collaborative, professional dialogs are undertaken. Yet, there lies a tension between enculturation into the norms of schools and promoting self-belief, participation, and collaboration. Drawing on a qualitative methodology, in this study we focused on the conceptions and expectations of classroom mentoring within the context of a teacher reform initiative in Scotland. Findings indicated that participants in the study held a mixture of beliefs regarding mentoring practices. Implications for partnership arrangements in initial teacher education and teachers’ career development were discussed.     

Women mentoring in the academe: a faculty cross-racial and cross-cultural experience

Two women faculty members, one White from the southeastern United States and one Black African from Zimbabwe, purposefully explored their informal mentoring relationship with the goal of illuminating the complexities associated with their cross-racial, cross-cultural experience. Concentrating on their four-year mentor-mentee academic relationship at a predominantly White institution (PWI), these women employed a dialogic duoethnographic methodology to uncover emerging, nuanced characteristics contributing to the positive nature of their mentoring experience. Calling upon a seminal nine-function mentoring framework focused on advancing mentee personal growth and professional advancement, the authors, engaged in critical interplay of dialogic considerations of their mentoring experiences, relationship, and literature. The authors revealed a distinct cross-cultural and cross-racial journey where each, as participant researcher, uncovered a deeper appreciation for the importance of engaged dialog. Emerging is a complex interplay of understandings about trust, care, and power dynamics as factors in defining mentoring relationships that work for good.     

Relational-cultural Theory as a Framework for Mentoring in Academia: Toward Diversity and Growth-fostering Collaborative Scholarly Relationships

Mentoring in academia that encourages collaboration and interpersonal relationships is important in helping newer faculty members attain success. Developing such programs is challenging within our prevailing academic context that rewards competition and individually delineated success. We propose that Relational Cultural Theory, a feminist approach to healthy psychological growth, developed by Jean Baker Miller and colleagues at the Stone Center at Wellesley College, is an appropriate framework to guide effective mentoring programs, with a particular focus on cross-cultural mentoring of protégés in academia who are women and/or of color. We suggest the traditionally individual-oriented definition of success in academia could be modified toward more emphasis on collaboration, recognizing, and celebrating the rich diversity within academia. This emphasis can strengthen organizations by increasing and embracing diversity, adding to the richness of ideas and approaches to societal problems. Mentoring is defined through an expanded view that recognizes healthy collaboration as an indicator of success in academia.     

Efficacy Perceptions of Preservice and Inservice Teachers in China: Insights Concerning Culture and Measurement

This study comprises the second stage of a research program in which sense of efficacy for teaching (SET) was investigated in Chinese mainland preservice and inservice teachers (PSTs and ISTs, respectively). Scores on SET were calculated and described, and SET comparisons were made between and within PSTs and ISTs. Relative to PSTs, ISTs had higher SET; within both the PSTs and IST samples there were no gender differences; but among ISTs there were some associations of SET with years of teaching, teacher roles, and whether the schools were categorized as advanced or standard. Tentative comparisons are drawn concerning SET in Chinese and Western contexts, and recommendations are made concerning effective measurement of teacher sense of efficacy in China and elsewhere.     

Identifying the costs and benefits of educational psychology: a preliminary exploration in two local authorities

This article provides an account of a small-scale pilot study of the cost and perceived benefits of the educational psychology services in two comparably small local authorities in England. This study is preparatory to a more detailed examination of the costs and likely benefits of state provision of educational psychology services in England. The work is contextualised by acknowledgement of the growing pressure on local authority services to trade and for schools to directly commission the services of educational psychologists. Provisional findings indicate significant differences between the impact of the two services that participated. The authors offer speculation on the effects for local authorities and schools, and ways in which the study might be developed to provide more satisfactory answers to the questions of “what is the value of educational psychology in practice” and “how best to deploy educational psychology services?”     

Undergraduate Research and Service-Learning Programs in a Kinesiology Program at a Teaching University

High-impact practices foster student success, but faculty faced with heavy teaching loads and lack of resources and infrastructure are challenged to implement such practices. Kinesiology faculty at California State University, East Bay collaborated to implement two student programs: Kinesiology Research Group and Get Fit! Stay Fit! The Kinesiology Research Group, a faculty–student research group, and Get Fit! Stay Fit!, a service learning experience, partnered to consolidate human and structural resources. Student–faculty mentoring circles were used to support this innovative partnership. Here, we report student perceptions of the value of these programs to their academic and professional development.     

Teacher's academic optimism: The development and test of a new construct

The objective of this exploratory study of teacher beliefs was twofold: first, to determine whether the construct of academic optimism could be defined and measured as an individual teacher characteristic as it has been at the collective school level, and second, to identify sets of teacher beliefs and practices that were good predictors of academic optimism. With a diverse sample of American elementary teachers, a second-order principal components analysis supported the hypothesis that academic optimism was a general construct composed of efficacy, trust, and academic emphasis. In addition, dispositional optimism, humanistic classroom management, student-centred beliefs and practices, and organizational citizenship behaviour were individually and collectively related to the explanation of a teacher's sense of academic optimism, controlling for SES.     

Changes in student effort and grade expectation in the course of a term

Students were surveyed and asked to self-evaluate their performance and time-on-task in six engineering courses (eight sections). Surveys were conducted four times over the course of a 10-week quarter. Students with the highest grade point averages (GPAs) (2.88 mean; 4.00 mode) indicated ‘no change’ while students with lower GPAs (2.67 mean; 1.83 mode) indicated a ‘negative change’ in grade expectations by the end of the quarter, indicating that better performing students are better self-evaluators. Students reduced time-on-task 2–4 hours/week, especially early in the quarter. Students who changed their time-on-task during each survey had a GPA mode of 4.00, indicating that ‘master’ students readily adapt to course demands. This study shows that most students over-predict their grades and their level of commitment to a course and lose confidence in their abilities as the term progresses. It is suggested that instructors obtain student grade predictions and use them to provide timely and appropriate feedback.