Who Goes Who Stays: An Assessment of the Effect of a Freshman Mentoring and Unit Registration Program on College Persistence

Mangold, William D.; Bean, LuAnn; Adams, Douglas; Schwab, William A.; Lynch, Scott M.

doi:10.2190/cvet-tmdm-cte4-afe3

Cited by 56 publications

(32 citation statements)

References 21 publications

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“…Benefits of mentoring include improved academic performance (Campbell and Campbell 1997), social integration (Allen et al 1999), and retention rates (Mangold et al 2002). Being a part of a trusting mentoring relationship is especially crucial for women (McCormick et al 2014;Seymour and Hewitt 1997;Whitten et al 2003), underrepresented minorities (Cohen et al 1999;Tsui 2007), and first-generation college students (Harrell and Forney 2003;Tsui 2007) in the physical sciences.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Increasing STEM success: a near-peer mentoring program in the physical sciences

2016

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Background: Mentoring supports professional success in a myriad of fields; in the physical sciences, mentoring increases the retention of diverse groups of students. While physics education has made progress in classifying the availability and structural components related to mentoring programs, little is known about the qualitative nature of mentoring relationships. This article draws from frameworks in science identity and belongs to analyze the nature of relationships in the mentoring program offered by the Sundial Project at Arizona State University, which aims to help new students with diverse backgrounds succeed in physics and related majors. To provide insight into mentoring relationships, we analyze over 150 reports submitted by mentors and mentees in a near-peer mentoring program. Results: Mentoring groups enjoyed positive rapport and often remarked upon becoming friends. As such, mentoring relationships provided mentees with both psychosocial and academic support. Mentoring supported students to deal with a wide variety of topics, ranging from academic to personal, according to the needs of individual mentees. Moreover, outcomes of students in the mentoring program were favorable; the mean GPA of participating mentees was 3.49 for their first college semester. Conclusions: Mentors acted both as guides who shared information and as caring friends who providing psychosocial support, including normalizing struggle. These connections supported students to develop a sense of belonging and positive science identities.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Increasing STEM success: a near-peer mentoring program in the physical sciences

2016

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“…While we did anecdotally witness some dysfunctional team dynamics, because we switched up teams and assured no student was ever with the same peer twice, this dysfunction was short-lived and it seems students appreciated this approach. Finally, by maximizing interactions throughout the student body, we intended to increase social interactions, which have been shown to boost retention 12,17 , particularly for students in underrepresented groups 18 ; Question 10 suggests we were successful in the aim of creating connections between students.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Furthermore, research has revealed that developing a sense of community and belonging within a department can also result in significant gains in retention [17][18][19][20] and student learning 21 .…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Results & Lessons Learned from a Chemical Engineering Freshman Design Laboratory

Butterfield¹,

Branch²

2015 ASEE Annual Conference and Exposition Proceedings

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Kyle Branch is a second-year graduate student at the University of Utah Department of Chemical Engineering. He has helped develop and teach the described freshman laboratory course. His main research interest is in engineering education, focusing on the creation and analysis of interactive simulations for undergraduate chemical engineering courses.c American Society for Engineering Education, 2015 Page 26.1337.1 Results & Lessons Learned from a Chemical EngineeringFreshman Design Laboratory Abstract A survey of United States chemical engineering curricula shows that a relatively small number of departments offer their first-year students a laboratory experience focused on core chemical engineering concepts using hands-on design projects. Furthermore, the first-year chemistry and physics laboratories taken by engineering students do not typically ask them to exercise the type of creativity that attracted students to engineering in the first place.In order to bring more active, collaborative, and hands-on learning into our curriculum, we created a freshman chemical engineering design course and laboratory. This course is situated in the second semester of our curriculum, after a more traditional lecture-based introduction to chemical engineering course, which we have used as a benchmark for our results.In the design laboratory, individual freshmen first use interactive browser-based simulations to familiarize themselves with the relevant theory and data analysis. They are then put into teams, which are given design goals and access to a wide variety of inexpensive materials and tools. Such design goals include, for example, building a process to automatically create homogenous alginate beads for drug deliver, or building a photobioreactor to grow algae effectively. Students then validate their designs and compare their data to that predicted by theory. Students are trained on the use of Arduino microcontrollers and MATLAB to enable them to collect data from a variety of sensors. The course also includes a collaborative assignment on our seniors' final project, for which our freshmen create resumes and apply. The semester is then capped with a proposal and final project of their own design.We have collected three semesters of results from student surveys, pre-and post-tests, and detailed usage data from online simulations. The data indicate the pedagogy used in this course has been greatly successfully on multiple fronts. Students report remarkably high levels of satisfaction when compared to control surveys from more traditional lecture-based courses. They indicate that the collaborative methods used have helped them make social connections within the department. Student learning has been demonstrably improved and their skill sets have broadened. The prototyping, teamwork, communication, and data-analysis skills that students have gained early in the curriculum have also greatly increased the value of our freshmen to faculty research programs and others who hire our students as interns.

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“…40 Studies suggest that programs that explicitly include mentoring and support groups improve student involvement, motivation, and academic self-confidence and, in turn, increase institutional commitment and engagement. 41,42 Inclusive, welcoming institutional environments and the connections students feel have been linked to persistence. [43][44][45] Other research shows that learning communities have positive effects on persistence.…”

Section: Community Support (Building a Community Of Scholars)mentioning

confidence: 99%