Higher education institutions are currently tackling a growing number of organizational challenges that have forced departments to evolve their business practices. Administrators are faced with the need for more diverse programs which require facilities, faculty, and services, and must decide whether to develop talent internally or recruit new qualified candidates (Kutchner & Kleschick, 2016). Given the great cost of faculty searches, and the perceived diminishing availability of talented applicants, it is imperative that administrators understand the importance and value of mentoring relationships to fill needs with qualified candidates in higher education institutions. However, formal mentoring programs have been slow to develop in higher education institutions. This publication defines mentorship, explains the value of mentorship, and describes how mentoring programs can be established.
This study explores how different team configurations based on members’ experiential learning styles impacted group level variables including team learning behavior, stages of team development, potency, psychological safety, and satisfaction in an undergraduate class. Groups with homogeneous learning styles experienced higher levels of friendship and lower levels of conflict, which were associated with greater satisfaction and more rapid progress through the stages of group development. Most significantly, satisfaction was more strongly correlated to team learning behavior than psychological safety, suggesting that student groups in higher education settings may rely on other factors to progress through the stages of group development.
Stress is becoming synonymous with the undergraduate student experience. Stress can be a productive motivator for students, but unhealthy levels can create distress, which can cause students to experience burnout and health issues. In this study, students were enrolled in a course and asked to provide feedback on levels of stress to instructors while undergoing a stressful phenomenon, the COVID-19 pandemic. Analysis of qualitative student reflections identified themes that contributed to student distress including academic stress, financial/work stress, personal stress, university-related stress, family-related stress, and interpersonal stress. Undergraduate students reported their highest levels of distress related to academic stress. While some students did not believe faculty should be responsible for reducing their stress, others provided tangible strategies for reducing distress. Strategies that faculty can implement to reduce their students’ distress include being more flexible with due dates and assignments, reducing student’s unnecessary workload, and coordinating due dates with other faculty in their programs.
Despite an overwhelming amount of research in recent years on the importance of mentoring in higher education, little data exists on what factors predict faculty self-evaluations of mentoring competence in agricultural faculty. This is important because as research on mentoring has increased there has been a proliferation of different training programs for faculty in academia to improve mentoring outcomes, with little regard for what variables predict self-perceived mentoring skill. This study used a cross-sectional survey design to collect faculty self-evaluations of mentoring competence from a national sample of agricultural faculty. Regression analysis was used to determine what factors, identified as potentially important from prior research, predicted positive self-evaluations of mentoring competence. Results showed that discipline self-efficacy, feelings of impostorism, average mentoring frequency, and prior mentor training were all significant predictors, while gender was almost significant. The implications of these findings and avenues for future research for mentoring in higher education are discussed.
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