DEVELOPING A SCALE TO UNDERSTAND THE KEY ACTIONS OF EFFECTIVE GRADUATE STUDENT MENTORS

Mentoring is recognized as a crucial form of teaching in a broad variety of educational fields, including many science, technology, engineering, and math-related disciplines. Effective mentoring has been linked to students’ success when examining a broad variety of outcomes, including students’ satisfaction with their programs, retention rates, and intention to pursue further education. Graduate students, in particular, routinely work with an advisor (mentor) and tend to have a range of positive and negative experiences with their mentors. Few studies, however, explore the behaviors of graduate student mentors that specifically contribute to effective mentoring, making it difficult to train mentors to behave in a way that supports positive programmatic outcomes for students. The purpose of this study was to create a reliable and valid, easily administered instrument to assess mentoring. Such an instrument could identify the key behaviors that characterize successful mentoring and allow for the identification of specific areas of strengths and weaknesses for mentors working with students. Furthermore, knowledge gained from such an instrument could potentially provide an opportunity to fine-tune mentoring trainings for specific groups of mentors working in a wide range of programs and departments at both the undergraduate and graduate levels. In this study, we describe the process of refining a mentoring instrument after surveying graduate students at a large U.S. Midwestern University about their mentoring experiences. Using exploratory factor analysis, we found three factors with high reliability that defined mentoring behaviors (advisor’s attitude, engagement, and accessibility), and that we could reduce the number of scale items from 57 to 15, allowing for a more efficient scale. Implications for engaging faculty in professional development around effective mentoring will be discussed.