This Complete Evidence-Based Paper presents research about a layered peer mentorship
program for undergraduate engineering students at a public urban research university and ways
that students have made meaning from their mentorship experiences. This mentorship program
began in Fall 2019 and has grown to include the following layers: (a) first-year students who
receive mentorship, (b) sophomore- and junior-level students who serve as mentors (all of whom
received mentorship during their first year), (c) junior- and senior-level students who serve as
lead mentors who design the program for that academic year (including content, group meetings,
service projects, meeting schedules, etc.), (d) a graduate student who mentors and supervises the
lead mentors, and (e) a faculty member who oversees the overall program, provides general
guidance, and advises all the students. We will describe ways in which the participating students
have made meaning of their experience in the program, highlighting three key areas: (1) the web
of relationships formed, which cohere into a community; (2) students’ transitions from receiving
mentorship as first-year students to mentoring others in their sophomore and junior years; and (3)
the feedback and iteration process by which the program has continuously developed, which
forefronts student voice and agency. The paper will provide specific examples in each of the
three key areas described, with a special focus on students’ own descriptions of the meaning they
have made through their participation in the mentorship program. Recommendations will also be
shared for those interested in implementing similar programs on their campuses.
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Development of a Mentorship Program in Engineering and Engineering Technology
This paper discusses feasible means of integrating mentorship programs into engineering and engineering technology curricula. The two main motivations for investigating the development of such programs are to improve retention rates and to augment the efforts toward increasing the enrollment of minority students. In fact, it can be argued that a mentorship program can also indirectly assist in the achievement of critical student outcomes for accreditation. The model of mentorship presented in this paper involves a vertical integration of cohorts through a series of project-based learning (PBL) courses. Furthermore, this attempt is enhanced by the introduction of incentives that encourage student involvement in undergraduate research as well as on-campus engineering organizations. The specific focus of the mentorship is on student-student relationships in addition to the conventional faculty-student relationships. These relationships allow students to learn from each other since they are able to strongly relate to each other’s experiences among their peer group. The mentoring model proposed in this paper formulates a learning community that allows the student to form a support group and a mechanism for preventive intervention, as discussed in other studies on mentoring programs. Such student engagement is commonly acknowledged to significantly benefit the students as well as the student mentors involved in the program. Data from an initial student survey that measures the efficacy of the proposed mentorship program is included in this paper and these data are discussed in detail. A 1-5 Likert scale is used for quantitative analysis of the data in order to evaluate the self-efficacy of the program. The group size of the mentorship cohort has been limited to a maximum of thirty students at this stage. Preliminary analysis of the data indicates that the participating students have a strongly positive opinion of the program.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1355872
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10067327
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- American Society for Engineering Education Annual Conference and Exposition -
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 26.523.1 to 26.523.12
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/10.18260/p.23862
