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The Impact of S-STEM Faculty Mentoring on the Mentors

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Conference

2022 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Location

Minneapolis, MN

Publication Date

August 23, 2022

Start Date

June 26, 2022

End Date

June 29, 2022

Conference Session

NSF Grantees Poster Session

Page Count

3

DOI

10.18260/1-2--41983

Permanent URL

https://peer.asee.org/41983

Download Count

169

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Paper Authors

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Donna Llewellyn Boise State University

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Emily Knaphus-Soran University of Washington

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Emily Knaphus-Soran is a Senior Research Scientist at the University of Washington Center for Evaluation & Research for STEM Equity (UW CERSE). Emily has served as the evaluator for several NSF-funded programs aimed at improving diversity, equity, and inclusion in STEM education. Emily earned a PhD and MA in Sociology from the University of Washington, and a BA in Sociology from Smith College. Emily approaches her work with the intention to use her positions of privilege to challenge white supremacy and contribute to building a more just world. In doing so, she acknowledges the risk that her own blind spots and persistent biases could surface in her research, and invites continued discussion of research findings and implications with this in mind.

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Abstract

While there is a fair amount of literature around the impact of mentoring on those being mentored, there is much less known about the impact on those who are doing the mentoring. In our S-STEM project that involves multiple universities, the engineering student scholarship recipients are assigned engineering faculty mentors for their first year in their programs. We set out to investigate if and how the act of mentoring these students changed the faculty perceptions of what it takes to succeed in an engineering academic program and beyond. We also set out to investigate the motivation for faculty to sign up to mentor our S-STEM students and to learn from that to inform other mentoring programs. Our S-STEM targets low income, under-represented, and academically talented engineering students who are not ready for college calculus classes upon admission to the university. Traditionally, many engineering faculty would not expect students who start their academic programs with less high school math preparation to succeed. However, this S-STEM and its predecessor programs have shown that these students can thrive given the right environment and support. Therefore, our hypothesis was that the faculty would have the opportunity to change their initial perceptions of what it takes to succeed, and perhaps extend these new insights to their other mentoring experiences. Our methods included annual focus groups and/or surveys over the past four years, with a one-year hiatus for COVID related reasons last year. As we come to the end of our S-STEM project, we will report on what we have learned and what questions remain.

Llewellyn, D., & Knaphus-Soran, E. (2022, August), The Impact of S-STEM Faculty Mentoring on the Mentors Paper presented at 2022 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition, Minneapolis, MN. 10.18260/1-2--41983

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