This paper examined the role of climate (e.g., interactions with others) in the skill development of engineering and physical science doctoral students. Skill development in graduate school often is connected to students’ primary funding mechanism, which enables students to interact with a research group or teaching team. Advisors also play a pivotal role in the engineering doctoral student experience; however, less is known about how positive mentoring influences specific skill development for engineering doctoral students. Analyzing data from the Graduate Student Funding Survey (n = 615), we focused analyses on three climate Factors (Advising climate; Faculty and staff climate; Peer climate) and specific skill
development variables (research, teamwork and project management, peer training and mentoring, and communication). We found that advising climate was statistically significant for all four career-related skills, faculty and staff climate for peer training and mentoring skills only, and peer climate for both peer training and mentoring and communication skills. Our findings highlight the importance of climate from a variety of sources within engineering doctoral programs for the development of career-related skills.
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Exploring Dissonance and Harmony Among Mentees and Mentors' Conceptualizations of Effective Peer Teaching Mentorship
Graduate student peer-mentoring programs benefit participants by providing unique academic, social, psychological, and career development opportunities (Lorenzatti et al., 2019). However, the positive effects of research-oriented peer-mentoring programs are much better understood than teaching-oriented ones. In our poster, we consider mentees and mentors’ perceptions of effective mentoring in a teaching-oriented peer mentorship program.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1821619
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10447764
- Editor(s):
- Lischka, A. E.; Dyer, E. B.; Jones, R. S.; Lovett, J. N.; Strayer, J.; Drown, S.
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Proceedings of the forty-fourth annual meeting of the North American Chapter of the International Group for the Psychology of Mathematics Education.
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 1010-1011
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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