Assessing mentoring in organizations: an evaluation of commercial mentoring instruments

The purpose of this article is to inform readers about the types of instruments available for assessing and improving mentoring in organizations. Extensive review of the psychological, business and medical literature was conducted to identify commercially published, practitioner‐oriented instruments. All of the instruments that were identified – including the Alleman mentoring activities questionnaire, Mentoring in the moment, Mentoring skills assessment, and Principles of adult mentoring scale – are evaluated herein. Each instrument’s target audience, raters, subscales, response options, psychometric properties, and relative strengths and weaknesses are described. Although these instruments are reported to be used extensively, evidence of their validity is not always available. This review presents information that, in combination with first‐hand inspection of the instruments, should enable practitioners to differentiate between instruments that may be a fit for their needs from those that are not. Furthermore, it may introduce academic readers to instruments that are not covered in the scholarly literature in spite of their common use for non‐research purposes.     

Resistance as method: unhappiness,group feeling,and the limits of participation in a digital storytelling workshop

This paper offers a narrative case study of Mirabel, one participant in a digital storytelling workshop for women who were newcomers to Canada, whose experience compelled me to rethink conceptualizations of participation in social justice-oriented, community-based participatory media projects. Drawing on the work of Sara Ahmed, I consider how Mirabel’s resistance to the ‘promise of happiness’ offered by the group was interpreted by others as a failure to participate. Conversely, I suggest that Mirabel’s experience and her digital story are generative for thinking about resistance as a method of participation and a political resource for the group. I argue that conceptualizations of participation should be complicated to include the kinds of agency demonstrated by participants like Mirabel who resist the norms of the digital storytelling workshop and group culture.     

Effect of a conspecific’s presence on deprived rats’ Performance: Social facilitation vs distraction/imitation

The present study investigated effects of (a) conspecific’s “mere presence” and (b) water deprivation on emission of dominant responses by rats. Zajonc (1965) suggests that a conspecific’s presence functions like a physiologically based drive in enhancing performance of dominant responses. Alternative interpretations suggest that a conspecific’s presence impairs performance by distracting the observer or eliciting imitation of “irrelevant” responses. The social facilitation vs distraction/imitation hypotheses were tested in a 2 by 2 design: Barpress-trained rats, deprived of water for 4 or 23 h, barpressed for water in the presence of a naive rat or alone. Results supported social facilitation theory: Performance was significantly higher when the conspecific was present rather than absent and when the responder was 23 h rather than 4 h deprived. In reconciling these data with conflicting results, it was suggested that degree of contact may be important in determining how a conspecific’s presence affects performance of dominant responses.     

Pointing to parallels in ability-related differences in the use of metacognition in academic and psychomotor tasks

This paper offers a brief review of the use of metacognition by proficient and poor performers in academic and psychomotor tasks as well as highlights the parallels and provides directions for future research. Metacognition is knowledge about one's own cognitive processes [Flavell, J.H. (1979). Metacognition and cognitive monitoring: A new area of cognitive-developmental inquiry. American Psychologist, 34, 906–911.]. To date, the study of the use of metacognition by children with different levels of abilities (from those having a learning disability to those identified as gifted) has been mostly restricted to the cognitive abilities in academic areas such as reading, writing, or mathematics. The structure of knowledge has been more extensively explored in the expertise literature in the performance of both academic and psychomotor tasks. Similarities have been noted in the characteristic differences between experts and novices in both these types of tasks. Studies have begun to explore the use of metacognition in psychomotor tasks such as key strokes, ball throwing–catching, and running. It seems that, as with the structure of knowledge, parallels also exist in the use of metacognition by poor and proficient performers in academic and psychomotor tasks.     

Becoming employable students and ‘ideal’ creative workers: exclusion and inequality in higher education work placements

In this paper we explore how the ‘employable’ student and ‘ideal’ future creative worker is prefigured, constructed and experienced through higher education work placements in the creative sector, based on a recent small-scale qualitative study. Drawing on interview data with students, staff and employers, we identify the discourses and practices through which students are produced and produce themselves as neoliberal subjects. We are particularly concerned with which students are excluded in this process. We show how normative evaluations of what makes a ‘successful’ and ‘employable’ student and ‘ideal’ creative worker are implicitly classed, raced and gendered. We argue that work placements operate as a key domain in which inequalities within both higher education and the graduate labour market are (re)produced and sustained. The paper offers some thoughts about how these inequalities might be addressed.     

Developing an empirically based typology of attitudes of entering students toward participation in learning communities

Learning communities (LC) seek to strengthen and enrich students’ connections to each other, their teachers, and the subject matter they are studying. Their success depends on the nature of the learning community program, the learning styles of the students who participate and the reasons why students entered the program. This study uses a combination of factor and cluster analysis to develop a typology of student experiences that is used to examine the efficacy of the Learning Community program at Temple University, Philadelphia. The findings identify distinctive types of learning community experience and show that not all types match well with all students. The study questions the common assumption that learning communities are always helpful to student learning and development, and cautions against the belief that benefits will inevitably accrue. The variation in the value and impact on students of this long‐standing learning community program suggests that the evaluative burden of proof is for administrators to clearly demonstrate and not assume a uniformly positive impact of learning communities.     

Premotor and Motor Reaction Time As a Function of Response Complexity

Abstract

Two experiments were conducted to identify the response elements responsible for the complexity effect found by Henry and Rogers (1960). An attempt was made to determine if these elements were affecting the premotor time component of simple reaction time (SRT). If they were, a strong case could be made for the argument that neuromotor programming time was affected because premotor time is a more exact estimate of it than SRT. The results revealed that premotor time was unaffected by a forward change in movement direction, but increased as the number of movement parts increased from one to two and as the demand for movement accuracy increased. Thus, increasing the (1) number of parts and (2) accuracy demands were identified as elements of response complexity which increase programming time and support Henry and Rogers (1960) hypothesis that the time to initiate a response becomes longer as the programming process become more complex.