Reliability Analysis of the Adult Mentoring Assessment for Extension Professionals

The Adult Mentoring Assessment for Extension Professionals will help mentors develop an accurate profile of their mentoring style with adult learners and identify areas of proficiency and deficiency based on six constructs—relationship, information, facilitation, confrontation, modeling, and vision. This article reports on the reliability of this new instrument. Extension agents in 10 southern states completed the assessment, and each construct was analyzed through the use of Cronbach\u27s alpha procedures. All six constructs were well within the acceptable range of reliability. Personnel in other Extension systems and similar organizations can now be confident using this tool for training and development purposes

Mentoring Adult Learners: Implications for Cooperative Extension as a Learning Organization

A comprehensive summary of the existing literature on mentoring of adult learners, in the context of the Cooperative Extension System as a learning organization, reveals that structured organizational mentoring is needed in Extension to prepare and develop individuals to be future leaders in the organization. Further inquiry is needed regarding Extension as a transformative learning organization, the role of mentees in Cooperative Extension as adult learners, training needed for veteran Extension agents to effectively serve as mentors, and orientation processes for new hires on making the most of the relationship with a mentor