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Research Proposal

Does Peer Mentorship of First Year Students Aid in the Transition to Rutgers University?

Chi-Chi Okonkwo, Miriam Jaffe-Foger, Ning Chen

Professor Kimberly Convery

I. Introduction:

The number of entering college students in distress has grown. Headlines report alarming rates of deaths due to substance abuse and suicide (O’Connor, 2011; Hoover, 2003; Gately, 2005, Schaeffer, 2006). In 2006, first-year students accounted for more than one-third of undergraduate deaths, 40% from suicide. There is little doubt that students have difficulty making the transition from home to school (Kadison, et al., 2004): managing independence and time with minimal adult supervision, competing, and relating to peers. As they leave behind the familiar worlds of support and friends, family, and surroundings, they are often at greater risk for academic, personal, and social stress. Research shows that drinking and suicidal ideation are associated with stress (Hicks and Miller, 2006), that relationship transitions are related to mental health problems in young adulthood, and the mood and substance disorders are associated in significant ways to relationship instability (Overbeek, et al., 2003).

Peer mentorship for first year students exists at many universities to mitigate these problems. Peer mentorship is defined here as non-first year undergraduate students who can help first year students with the psycho-social and academic skills (i.e. time management, study strategies, registration, goal setting) transition as they move into the college setting. We hope to use this research to suggest programming strategies for future peer mentorship programs.

II. Hypothesis:

This exploratory study will observe the effect of including psychosocial support to an academic peer mentorship program. Utilizing the writing peer mentorship program that currently exists at Rutgers, our research will examine whether or not peer mentorship relationships within that program that include both psychosocial and academic support positively affect first year students’ academic experiences more so than peer mentorship relationships that only offer academic support. We hope to use this research to suggest including social and emotional support components to academic peer mentorship programs like the writing program here at Rutgers to help improve the academic experiences of first year students.

Based on research that highlights the effectiveness of peer mentorship practices, our research study seeks to explore the role emotional and social support play in a peer mentorship relationship. Our study will compare the academic effects of peer mentorship relationships that only offer academic support to the academic effects of peer mentorship relationships that offer social and emotional support in addition to academic support. Furthermore, our research question is as follows: Do peer mentorship relationships that offer social, emotional, and academic support positively affect first year students’ academic competencies more so than peer mentorship relationships that only offer academic support?

Our team gathered literature on peer mentorship practices within institutions of higher education. Many of the studies helped confirm the importance of emotional and social support within peer mentorship practices. The literature confirmed the following:

· Emotional and directive listening are important components to peer mentorship practices because it helps mentees feel supported and heard.

· Unlike online mentorship relationships, mentorship relationships that are established in-person tend to produce students who become cultural capital to a University. Additionally, unlike online peer mentorship relationships, in-person mentorship relationships allow active listening to take place between peer mentors and their mentees.

· Peer mentorship programs should help students feel connected to a university and others within the institution.

· Social integration and social support are the two main factors that will actually foster students’ engagement with the instruction that takes place in tutoring aspects of mentorship and the instruction of the university overall.

· Because traditional mentoring has typically excluded individuals of less represented races, ethnicities, sexual identities, and socioeconomic status, minority populations are in even more need of mentoring.

· A negative relationship between mentoring and reported stress exists among students who are mentored because the experience of emotional support is related to the transition into independent study found in a college setting.

The literature highlights peer mentorship best practices that illustrate the benefit of utilizing social and emotional support within peer mentorship programs. The studies confirm the positive utility of these two components of mentorship when coupled with academic support. Using a deductive approach, our research team will utilize the research highlighted in the literature as a basis to create a research design that tests the following hypothesis: A peer mentorship relationship that offers social, emotional, and academic support has a more positive effect on first year students’ academic competencies than a peer mentorship relationship that only offers academic support.

III. Literature Review

What works and what does not in examples of peer mentoring programs in American universities and beyond? This review of literature on the subject reveals that at least some aspects of mentoring work to reduce the stress of transition from home to University for first year students across the board. The information gained here prepares us to explore which elements of peer mentorship would be most useful in the creation of a program dedicated to meeting the needs of Rutgers students, especially as it considers online mentorship versus in-person mentorship, the training of mentors, levels and areas of mentee satisfaction with peer mentorship, community building, the impact on peer tutoring on the overall quality of academic and social standards at the university level, peer mentorship’s emotional impact on first year students, its prospects for minority student retention, and practices for evaluating the effectiveness of programs like the one proposed here.

One of the most interesting studies was conducted in Australia. Muldoon describes two approaches to peer mentorship: a face-to-face peer program and an online program that covers both social and academic elements of freshman life at the university. The online induction program was found to be more effective than in person mentorship, especially for students who are a part of the increasing population of commuters and distance learners. These students are often more isolated from the university at large, thus putting their attrition rates at risk. Yet, as Muldoon observes, in-person peer mentorship bear its own risks, especially when those students who are trained to support other students but not well offer advice that cannot be recorded as most online communication is. Muldoon describes the guidelines the mentors were to follow, such as the basic avoidance of providing answers, but instead engaging in minimalist tutoring and guidance. Those guidelines are more easily followed in on-line assistance programs where interactions can be monitored by a superior or faculty mentor. Muldoon also used the online model to prove that peer mentorship is a process, not just an event. Online peer mentorship left a record of how many students responded to making contact with the mentor. Moreover, students intimidated by face-to-face meetings seemed to access the services more than students who were assigned in-person mentors (Muldoon, 2012).

Meanwhile, Karen Roland finds the campus atmosphere as a location to create community, which one might acknowledge trumps on-line peer mentorship programs because it draws people physically together whereby school grounds are used as instruments of socialization that do not exclude commuters or distance learners. For Roland, peer mentorship should aim to create citizenship and lead to investment in the university as a mode of student retention. If students who are mentored are encouraged to go on and themselves become mentors, this will build continuity and social responsibility which will create better socialization and academic engagement. Roland finds that through this type of peer mentorship, the students of a university become “cultural capital” (Roland, p. 58, 2008).

Another obstacle to Muldoon’s online project might be one that Raymond Young and Carl Cates point to in their study on emotional and directive listening in peer mentoring. Young and Cates cite that scholars who “agree that listening is one of the most critical skills for success in organizations and for leadership relationships” (Young and Cates, p. 21, 2004). The point is that mentors need to show active listening skills in order to make his or her protégé’s feel heard and truly supported. Clearly, the online program would pose some obstacles to this component of the peer mentorship we would like to create at Rutgers. After all, Young and Cates are correct in his assertion that mentorship should help mentees to feel connected to a place and to the people of that place. Specifically, emotional understanding—the expression of sympathy, empathy, support, and sensitivity—will help mentee’s sense of attraction to the university. Directive listening—offering advice, opinions, and perspective—are the elements of feedback needed to show emotional understanding (Young and Cates, pg. 23, 2004). Young and Cates provide a qualitative model for how a successful mentor-mentee relationship would work.

Ralph Hall and Zarni Jaugietis echo Young and Cates in their evaluation of successful peer mentorship programs, specifically those that use seniors as mentors for incoming freshman. Hall and Jauguetis say that social integration and social support are the two main factors that will actually foster students’ engagement with the instruction that takes place in tutoring aspects of mentorship and the instruction of the university overall. Social networks are valuable for collaborative study and advice about studying and/or classes. In the program that Hall and Jaugietis outline, extensive training of peer mentors is required, and the helpfulness of mentors and the impact of mentors is assessed through a variety of scales and measures that will useful to this project, including linear charts that we could replicate (Hall and Jaugietis, 2011).

One reason these mentorships are so important is that those who have been mentored have greater chances for career development, including higher promotion rates, greater career satisfaction, and higher overall compensation. Formal mentorships, which can last approximately six months, may turn into informal mentorships that help to build social networks around students’ goals. If students are less distracted by the problem they experience in the transition from home to school, they can focus on what the college experience is supposed to provide: an education leading to employment and a network of friends and career contacts. Allen, McManus, and Russell find a negative relationship between mentoring and reported stress because the experience of emotional support is so related to the transition into independent study (no parent involvement). When mentors act as mediators, as the chart “Results of Hierarchical Regression Analyses” depicts, mentors who provided “role modeling, acceptance and confirmation, counseling, and friendship” helped their mentees learn “the ropes” and the “norms” of the university (Allen, McManus, and Russell, p. 463, 1999). In this case, the university is like a pre-workplace, where students learn the tools they need to survive not only in the university but after, when they themselves transition into leadership roles.

Rosenthal and Shinebarger report on best practices for monitoring the success of peer mentorship programs. It is, of course, difficult to measure something as inherently qualitative as “emotional support,” which Rosenthal and Shinebarger agree is a larger issue than faculty advising on course registration. Sometimes, faculty may even challenge the activities of a peer mentorship program in their focus on the practical. The particular problems peer mentorship programs encounter are “outreach, publicity, and campus buy-in” and the “role of faculty in the program” due to their academic focus. Rosenthal and Shinebarger suggest tracking students on academic probation and working with student records to identify those in need of help. They also suggest having a “super-advisor” or a set of core faculty who can help facilitate the peer mentorship project among their peers. Finally, Rosenthal and Shinebarger advocate for university-wide involvement through peer-mentor faculty updates, case reports, and university wide activities. Without faculty involvement, a peer mentorship program is likely to fall through, thus negating the positive effects highlighted above.

As Stephanie Budge writes in her essay, “Peer Mentoring in Post-Secondary Education,” peer mentorships a reality in many university settings, so we must, as a whole, accept specific aspects of peer mentorship programs. Gender and mentoring, Budge finds, is a problem within peer mentorship that we need to collectively face. Whereas mentorship is commonplace among men, barriers exist in mentoring women, especially gender stereotypes and socialization practices. Women are perceived as passive, unable to lead, emotional, with a lack of assertiveness and competitiveness. Hence, matching women to women in peer mentorship programs can help to reduce the replication of these stereotypes in relationships between men and women, where societal rules of patriarchy still exist. But sometimes, cross-gender mentoring can help to open a conversation about gender hierarchies. Similarly, when mentoring minority populations, there are problems:

Because traditional mentoring has typically excluded individuals of less represented races, ethnicities, sexual identities, and socioeconomic status, minority populations are in even more need of mentoring. Many minority students are unaware of the types of mentoring resources that are available to them. Even if the students are aware, they believe the mentoring services will not help them. (Budge, p. 77, 2006)

As with cross gender mentoring versus matching, there are mixed reviews about how stereotyping can cause the mentor-mentee relationship to be “aggressive, threatening, and devoid of intimacy” (Budge, p. 78, 2006). Existing mentoring have a long way to go to solve these problems, and our study will take these issues into consideration.

Gerald Halpin, in his article “A Promising Prospect for Minority Retention,” suggests that when minority students are mentored as incoming students, they are more likely to become mentors themselves later in their college experience. The idea of guiding others helps them to keep their own grades up so that they can be eligible for the responsibility that has been taught to them by their mentors. Halpin points out that this type of program also helped in the recruitment of minority students to the university population. When minority students see other minority students as models for success, they “They can, I can’t” mentality is no longer a barrier (Halpin, p. 376, 2000). Halpin’s research show that peer mentors engaged in this project also keep their own grades up so as to be positive role models and see the opportunity as one that will help them achieve their career goals after college.

Our program will be modeled with the aforementioned research in mind, but based on the model provided by Jose L. Arco-Tirado and Juan-Miguel Fernandez-Balboa in their essay “The impact of a peer-tutoring program on quality standards in higher education” and on E. Shelley Ried’s guidelines in “Mentoring Peer Mentors: Mentor Education and Support in the Composition Program.” These two essays, when combined, utilize the university writing program as a means to keep the drop-out rate that happens in the first year under control. In Arco-Tirado and Fernandez-Balboa, the focus boils down to the integration into new social and academic environment and psycho-pedagogical skills that must be taught to mentors. Here, we find a healthy mix of counseling, time-management issues, ways to actively participate in learning, and the ultimate goal of the kind of student autonomy that leads to their self-chosen involvement. Arco-Tirado and Fernandex-Balboa take into account demographic variables and academic variables, which will be part of our methodology section as we find ways to assess “contextual conditions of study” (Acro-Tirado and Fernandez-Balbloa, p. 780, 2011). However, considering that our own research will take place in the Rutgers University Writing Program Tutoring Centers, Reid’s essay is invaluable as it argues that “mentoring should become a given in rhetoric and composition programs” (Reid, pg. 51, 2008). Reid outlines a definition for evaluation of expectations, she articulates goals, tasks, and structures, designs tools for program, assessment, and creates formal processes for starting each year’s program. Because writing is one of the most anxiety producing activities in the university as students are asked to rethink their own identities as active citizens rather than as mimetic thinkers, Reid agrees on the Writing Program as the cite for intervention in training tutors and teachers, thinking about how to keep good grades achievable when students are essentially being asked to reinvent themselves without as much access to parental support.

As writing is a means of making sense of experience and a tool for personal development, we can de-silo the academic portion of peer tutoring and combine it with peer mentoring so that’s students have a framework to move forward personally, socially, academically, and further down the line into their careers. Prior research shows that peer mentorship works. We believe it can work for us.

III. Methodology

a. Conceptualization, Operationalization, and Measurement

Before implementing our research, it is important to define the variables and concepts that exist within our hypothesis. The independent variables that exist include academic, social, and emotional support. Academic support “refers to the formal and informal strategies to build, strengthen and promote student’s mastery of subject matter and skill development through deliberate activities, structures, policies, and expectations” (Coles, Jager-Hyman, & Savitz-Romer, 2009). Social support is defined as “the establishment of social networks among other students and emotional support from peers and staff” (Hall & Jaugietis, 2010). Social support also fortifies and fosters social networks and school connectedness by utilizing specific strategies (Coles, Jager-Hyman, & Savitz-Romer, 2009). Finally, emotional support is defined here as “support that fosters self esteem and trust by providing students with empathy, caring, love, respect, concern, and a willingness to listen” (Coles, Jager-Hyman, & Savitz-Romer, 2009). The dependent variable in our hypothesis is first year students’ academic competencies. We will define academic competency as a student’s developing aptitude in six core academic skill areas acquired through academic experiences here at Rutgers.

Other concepts to define include peer mentorship. As mentioned before, peer mentorship is defined here as a formal relationship that is established under the supervision of a University program between and undergraduate first year mentee and a non-first year mentor for the purposes of helping the first year student with academic, social, and/or emotional needs.

In order to measure the variables listed above, a variety of methods will be utilized. To measure academic support, we will observe and identify whether or not a peer mentorship relationship offers tutoring. Tutoring will be identified in all of the peer mentorship relationships we observe. Because reliability is defined as discovering whether a particular technique, applied repeatedly to the same object, will yield the same result (Babbie & Rubin, 2011), our academic support measure is reliable because our technique looks for one identical academic strategy in every peer mentorship relationship we observe. This technique will be applied the same way to every peer mentorship relationship we identify and should yield the same results. In order to test the validity of our academic support measure, we can see if identifying tutoring in a peer mentorship relationship corresponds to higher grades, which also serves as an indicator of academic support. This will test validity because both higher grades and tutoring serve as indicators of academic support. Furthermore, seeing if these two indicators correspond with one another is a legitimate way to test validity.

In order to measure emotional and social support, our team will utilize a 24-point Lykert type scale utilized in a previous study on peer mentoring outcomes. The scale is broken up into three sections that focus on a mentee’s experience balancing tensions of socialization into an organization and the mentee’s perception of his or her mentor’s emotional and directive listening responses (Cates & Young, 2004). The first eleven items on the scale formed an outcome measure with high reliability (_=.93) (Cates & Young, 2004). The next 10 items on the scale that measured emotional listening yielded a high amount of reliability as well (_ =.93) (Cates & Young, 2004). The last 3 items on the scale that measured directive listening yielded an acceptable level of reliability (_=.79) (Cates & Young, 2004). The construct validity of this scale was measured using the “known groups method”. “This method compares scores on a measure with an expected high level group to an expected low level group” (Cates & Young, 2004). Scores for all three components of the scale were expected to be higher for women than men since women have been found to have better listening and emotional skills (Cates & Young, 2004). This position was tested utilizing a one-way ANOVA and the results indicated that women did indeed score higher than men (Cates & Young, 2004). These findings helped test the construct validity of the scale because the theoretical expectation that women have better listening and emotional skills than men does relate to the different scores women and men received on the scale.

In order to measure academic competency, we will use the Academic Competence scale that was utilized in a previous study on first year student experiences. The scale measures a student’s feelings on the extent to which a university has helped the student develop in six core areas: ‘‘writing clearly and effectively,’’ ‘‘thinking critically and analytically,’’ ‘‘speaking clearly and effectively,’’ ‘‘analyzing quantitative problems,’’ ‘‘using computing and information technology,’’ and ‘‘acquiring a broad general education’’ (Domingo, Terenzi, and Reason, 2006). The scale has a coefficient alpha of .85, which helps confirm its high reliability. In order to measure the scale’s validity, we will compare a student’s academic competence scale score to his or her GPA. We expect to see that students who score higher on the scale have higher GPAs than students who score lower on the scale. If this pattern does exist, it will prove that the scale is in fact valid.

b. Sampling

Our research study will pool first year undergraduate students and non-undergraduate mentors from the writing peer mentorship program at Rutgers University. The program currently has more than [500] first year students enrolled and more than [???] mentors who offer academic mentorship to these students. Two samples will be taken from the writing program in order to form a control and experimental group. Our control group will consist of 25 peer mentorship pairs (25 first year students connected to 25 non-first year mentors). The mentors in this group will only offer academic support as defined in this proposal. The experimental group will also consist of 25 peer mentorship pairs. The mentors in this group will be specifically trained to not only offer academic support, but also social and emotional support as defined by this proposal.

Because this study makes a generalization about first year students in regards to their academic competence, it is important to make sure that our samples adequately represent the first year student population at Rutgers university. In order to achieve this, our team will utilize a stratified random selection strategy in order to avoid systematic error. We will organize the first year student population into homogeneous subsets based on ethnicity and gender, and then select the appropriate number of first year students (elements) from each subset (Babbie & Rubin, 2011). Because this study makes generalizations about first year students and not mentors, mentors will be selected through a non-probability sampling method like voluntary participation. In order to ensure that our control and experimental groups are comparable, we will randomly assign participants to each group.

c. Research Design and Data Analysis

Our research team will utilize the pretest-posttest control group experimental design to conduct this study. We decided to use this design because it helps ensure the most internal validity, which is crucial when confirming causality between variables. This design is also appropriate for our study given the sampling methods we utilized to select participants in order to group them accordingly.

The first component of our research design is the pretest. After selecting our first year student participants by randomly assigning them to both a control and experimental group, we will administer the academic competence scale to both groups. The scale will serve as a way to measure academic competence (dependent variable) before the experimental group receives the intervention (social and emotional support). This pretest will help setup our study and we will administer the test after participants have been selected and consent forms have been issued and collected.

The next component in the design is implementing the intervention. The writing program offers semester-long academic peer mentorship to first year students taking University required writing courses. Mentors in the program are trained to offer academic support to first year students by providing writing tutoring once a week over the course of the semester to first year students enrolled in the program. For the purposes of our study, at the beginning of the semester, mentors in the control group will be trained as normal. In other words, they will only provide academic support to their mentees as is the custom of the writing peer mentorship program. In contrast, mentors in the experimental group will be given an extensive week-long training on providing social and emotional support in addition to writing tutoring using specific strategies. These strategies will include inquiring about the student’s socialization experiences, non-writing academic experiences, and overall transition into the Rutgers Community. Students will be trained extensively on the specific ways to administer these strategies in order to reduce any biases that might occur with implementing the intervention.

The final component of the design is the posttest. The academic competence scale will again be administered to first year students in both the experimental and control group at the end of the semester. We will also administer the 24-item Lykert scale that measures social and emotional support to both groups. Responses from both scales will be analyzed by determining the frequency distributions of the response data. The statistical significance of the data will then be tested using a t-test.

IV. Conclusion

Our research team has taken a number of different measures outlined in this proposal to ensure that our research is void of error. We hope to conduct a study with little threat to internal validity. We also hope to utilize measures that are both valid and reliable. By utilizing probability sampling, randomization, and an experimental research design, we hope that our study accurately tests our hypothesis with little to no error.

Although we have taken many measures to ensure that our research is of the highest evidence based practice quality, there are limitations to our study. For one, our study does not focus on other factors that may play a role on a first year student’s experiences. It only identifies academic effects, which are not the only significant effects that emotional and social support can have in the life of a first year student. Another limitation is the possibility that other factors outside the parameters of the study in addition to academic, social, and emotional support can account for a first year’s students improved or diminished academic competency. Even when utilizing experimental research designs, it is impossible to get rid of all possible extraneous variables. Despite the limitations of our study, we are confident the research methods we have proposed will help adequately test our hypothesis. This in turn will help develop better peer mentorship practices at Rutgers. If our research proves to be successful, with repetition and a larger more representative sample size, our findings will become generalizable and can be used to help improve other peer mentorship programs at other universities as well.

References

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APPENDIX A

Please report the extent to which you agree with the following statements.

My mentor has encouraged me to be myself.