Abstract:

Introduction:
Mentoring is an important process that has proven to be useful in most academic programs, especially in undergraduate studies. It facilitates students' personal and professional growth, regardless of their academic and personal experiences. Mentoring offers the opportunity to establish a human connection within an academic program focused on learning and developing new skills. Also, it creates empathetic relationships, not only between students, but between students and the professor/mentor. Guidance, support, and the transfer of experienced mentors to mentees, promote critical thinking in students, which in turn shows a better potential to unlock productivity, increase creativity and promote autonomous knowledge construction. These features may help students to develop a deep sense of security and comfort. On the other hand, most of the school programs ask students to evaluate their teachers’ academic work. This is a common practice and such results are quality indicators that are also an important on academic part for university programs. In this way, students give feedback to their professors through course evaluations at the university student’s service website. We have hypothesized that mentoring could be helpful for the evaluation of the teacher’s academic work to be better evaluated by students.

Objective:
This study emphasizes how mentoring can be related to a better evaluation of the professors professional development by the students, taking into consideration that students have more of an interested in helping growth their professors in their academic career.

Methods:
24 students from 2 class groups enrolled in a graduate program with specialization in orthodontics were not mentored, while another 24 students from 2 class groups were mentored. The same teacher taught all groups, including the same subjects, and in a very similar way of teaching. Finally, the professor’s evaluations of both groups were compared.

Results:
Teachers obtained better grades from mentored students groups, approximately 30% higher than those non-mentored students.

Conclusion:
Mentoring not only helps students in all aspects of mentoring, including their future job but it was also evident that mentoring is a useful tool in creating an excellent relationship between students and the instructor, which eventually reinforces a fair evaluation or, most importantly in some cases, to a better evaluation for the educator.

Keywords:

Education, mentoring, evaluation, teachers.