Chapter 17- Mentoring Redesigned to Attract Entry-Level Students

Competitive and highly structured mentoring relationships between undergraduate students and professional researchers are often life-changing. However, such mentoring programs often have rigid qualifications and attract students who are already advanced in their educational and professional planning. The University of New Mexico (UNM) developed a program to shift the paradigm to attract entry-level students for whom “professional research” was still a new and daunting concept. By pairing these students with engineers and scientists at the Air Force Research Laboratory and Sandia National Laboratory, UNM was able to engage students in structured, low-stakes mentoring that helped shape their current understanding of research, and illuminated career pathways and opportunities in their chosen academic disciplines. The Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) Collaborative Center staff recruited entry-level UNM students as mentees and recruited engineers and scientists as mentors. UNM then matched mentor-mentee pairs using an interest form, hosted introductory events for pairs to meet on campus, and followed up with mentors and mentees to provide support and promote ongoing conversations. Students who participated in this program were more likely than their peers to persist at UNM

Making Connections: A Handbook for Effective Formal Mentoring Programs in Academia

This book, Making Connections: A Handbook for Effective Formal Mentoring Programs in Academia, makes a unique and needed contribution to the mentoring field as it focuses solely on mentoring in academia. This handbook is a collaborative institutional effort between Utah State University’s (USU) Empowering Teaching Open Access Book Series and the Mentoring Institute at the University of New Mexico (UNM). This book is available through (a) an e-book through Pressbooks, (b) a downloadable PDF version on USU’s Open Access Book Series website), and (c) a print version available for purchase on the USU Empower Teaching Open Access page, and on Amazon

Re-examining achievement goal instrumentation: Convergent validity of AGQ and PALS

Questions persist about the validity of the two most widely used achievement goal instruments (Patterns of Adaptive Learning Scales, PALS; and the Achievement Goals Questionnaire, AGQ). This study uses structural equation modeling to examine the convergence of results obtained with the AGQ and PALS within the same sample of high school students (N = 278). A test of convergent validity supports that the two instruments may similarly operationalize mastery-approach goals, but differentially measure performance goals. Findings underscore the need to further examine performance goal assessment between the AGQ and PALS