Peer mentoring is a potential solution to the many challenges that nursing education is faced with today, including increasing class sizes, rising competency requirements, decreasing number of faculty, tightening budgets, and shrinking clinical placement opportunities. This article describes a successful peer mentoring program in the nursing clinical learning center at a southern Ontario university. The benefits to mentors, students, and the educational institution are discussed. In their role, peer mentors develop an increase in confidence with skills as well as with leadership and teaching abilities. Peer mentors provide a student-centered service that results in frequent positive feedback from students in all levels of the nursing program. A suggestion for the future potential of this role also is offered to expand undergraduate nursing students' exposure to peer mentoring.
This study, inspired by the efforts of NASW to improve the public perception and understanding of social work, focused on the perceptions and attitudes of college students regarding the profession of social work. The sample included 678 undergraduates at a state university who represented a wide variety of majors. Findings indicate that students' affiliation with a social worker, whether a family member, friend, or work or volunteer experience, positively influenced both their perception and understanding of the profession. Furthermore, regardless of demographics, respondents generally had a negative perception of the salary range of social workers, implying that this aspect of the profession could limit or deter students from choosing social work as a profession. Implications for improving the image of social work among college students are delineated along with issues that require further study.
The newly developed instrument provides a tool to comprehensively measure the satisfaction of nursing students with the academic aspects of their nursing programs.
In these economic times, retention of new faculty, particularly minority and international faculty, is a high priority. In this study, retention of new faculty from 2006 to 2013 was compared for participants and nonparticipants in a formal mentoring program. Retention was 92% for participating faculty and 58% for nonparticipating new faculty. For African‐American faculty, retention was 86% for participating and 56% for nonparticipating. Participating international faculty were retained at 100% and nonparticipating at 61%. The results indicate that mentoring programs including both individual and group mentoring provide a supportive community and self‐validation to new faculty, leading to high retention rates.
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