What do they mean by “success”? A study of high school students' judgments of success in an online mentoring program
Year: 2004
Type: article
Abstract: On-line mentoring or Telementoring has been implemented with increasing frequency in both elementary and secondary schools over the last decade as a way to link students' school work with that of adult communities of practice, and open their work to a wider responsive audience. This thesis is based on a curriculum development project involving telementoring called Tracking Canada's Past (TCP). TCP investigates the application of telementoring in the high school history curriculum through the use of Knowledge Forum@ software. The goal of the project is to help students understand the concept of history as a discipline through telementoring and the use of primary sources, in addition to standard textbooks. It is widely acknowledged that in telementoring programs, maintaining participants' interest and engagement is vital; but little empirical research has directly addressed the question of what rewards participants (particularly mentees) seek through their participation. Program designers have their own sense of what it means for their work to succeed, but what do the participants themselves think of as success? Knowing more about this would potentially enable program designers to provide more effective orientation and support. Research participants were high school social studies students, their teachers, and adult volunteers. The research used a combination of questionnaires for both students and mentors, interviews with students and mentors after the completion of the unit, and automatically generated computer records of students' and mentors' activities with the Knowledge Forum@ throughout the curriculum unit. Findings from this study indicate that students' judgments of success were best predicted by: their mentors' helpfulness in asking questions about their research; their mentors' helpfulness in recommending reading materials and other resources to support their work; their mentors' helpfulness in helping students develop questions to investigate; students' enthusiasm for the on-line discussion space in which they worked with their mentors; students' trust of their mentors. In the analysis of the full dataset, I also examined how and to what degree students' and mentors' expectations of the mentoring relationship differed from each other. and how students' expectations were influenced by actual experience with telementoring.
Source: Summit (Simon Fraser University)
Author: Mahboubeh Asgari
Institution: Simon Fraser University
Language: English
Subfield: Education
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
SDG: Quality education
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W1517172185