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This content will become publicly available on June 1, 2025

Title: Mentoring for Making: Peer Mentors Working with Learners in a Making-Focused Engineering Course
eer mentoring in college programs of study is not uncommon. However, most of the time, peer mentoring is focused on supporting students in traditional solving problems they are assigned as part of the coursework. Our work extends beyond examining conventional forms of peer mentoring by examining the work of peer mentors supporting students' work in a first-year engineering design course based in a makerspace classroom. The problems students solve in the makerspace classroom-based course typically have a wide array of possible solutions, which differs from many problems students solve in traditional courses with peer mentor support in which there is a single solution. Further, students in the makerspace classroom-based course are also expected to work in teams, which adds another layer of complexity to the role of the peer mentors working in the course. Our research goal was to empirically document the peer mentors' interactions with students and the students learning gains and development due to working with the peer mentors. To gather data from the students working with the peer mentors, we added a series of additional questions to their end-of-semester course evaluations. Note that the university's Institutional Review Board reviewed and approved this process. The questions we added included, "Please share how the peer mentors influenced your sense of belonging within the College of Engineering." "Please share how the peer mentors helped your group function as teams." and "Please share how the peer mentors helped you develop confidence in your abilities to do engineering." We also included companion Likert scale items such as "The peer mentors helped our team work together." and "The peer mentors helped us resolve conflicts in our group." We found that peer mentors tended to be perceived as a resource, supportive and reassuring to the students and meeting the students where they are. Thus, the mentors provided students with emotional, personal, and technical support to influence the students' sense of belonging to the college. The mentors helped the students function in teams by encouraging them to collaborate and include all. In their efforts to help students develop confidence in their abilities, the mentors worked to meet the students where they were at and reassured the students' capacity to succeed. They were also likely to encourage students to seek help, support their technical skill development, and encourage the students to apply their knowledge. The final focus of our research was on the mentors engaging in helping students feel part of the engineering community. We found the mentors encouraged the students to join an engineering club or attend engineering events. In our final report, we provide details of our data, both quantitative and qualitative, examples of the student's responses, the implications of our findings, and ideas for using our research to support mentor preparation programs to maximize the benefits of peer mentoring in maker spaces and other non-traditional engineering learning environments.  more » « less
Award ID(s):
2315230 2315229
PAR ID:
10534869
Author(s) / Creator(s):
; ;
Publisher / Repository:
ASEE Conferences
Date Published:
Subject(s) / Keyword(s):
Peer mentoring makerspace classroom first-year design engineering education
Format(s):
Medium: X
Location:
Portland, Oregon
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
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