Many educators have investigated the promise of mentoring as a vehicle of career development, yet no widely accepted definition of mentoring has been articulated. Without such definitional consensus, efforts to develop a knowledge base relevant to mentorships in education have been haphazard. To advance a knowledge base for future research, a definition of mentoring is offered that is grounded in contextual-developmental theory and consistent with the findings of past investigators. Corollaries of the contextual-developmental perspective raise issues that action research may profitably address to facilitate mentoring relationships. The proposed definition offers immediate benefits to mentors, protégés, and their sponsors as it highlights critical elements of the mentoring process.

No abstract

Extrapolating from D. H. Barlow (2000), the authors explored whether perceived control moderated the relation between coping with career indecision and choice anxiety among 126 women in low‐level jobs. Analyses of the women's career indecision, coping, perceived control, and career choice anxiety scores through regression identified the moderator effect. Perceived control interacted with problem‐focused coping to increase accountable variance in choice anxiety (p < .05). Women perceiving high control and doing more problem‐focused coping reported lower anxiety than did women doing comparable coping but perceiving lower control. Implications are discussed for interventions with women in low‐level jobs.

This study examined the relation of career attitudes as measured by the Attitude scale of the Career Maturity Inventory (Crites, 1973) to age and various indexes of career progress for 158 college students. There were 103 women and 55 men in liberal arts majors, with a mean age of 21.64 years. Path analysis suggested that career attitudes matured with age and directly affected months employed during college (p < .01) and grade point average (GPA; p < .01) and through the mediation of GPA affected the occupational level of the students' jobs (p < .01). Discussion points out how the model clarifies the operation of career attitudes and supports targeting career development interventions at maturation of career attitudes.

No abstract