Evaluating Mentorship Programs: Survey Items for Improving Student Affairs Practice.

Abstract

Evaluating Mentorship Programs:Survey Items for Improving Student Affairs Practice Frank Fernandez (bio), Sarah Mason (bio), Carrie L. Saetermoe (bio), and Gabriela Chavira (bio) Student affairs professionals are increasingly expected to assess and evaluate programs that support student success (Fallucca, 2018). Beyond satisfying accountability pressures, assessment and evaluation work is important for gathering data to improve practice and support students. The two leading student affairs associations, ACPA and NASPA (2015), have called upon student affairs professionals to use assessment and evaluation practices in ways that are culturally relevant and that support the ethics and values of the profession. In this Research in Brief, we draw on our experiences evaluating a program that uses critical race theory to improve faculty–student mentoring. We share survey items from the quantitative portion of the evaluation, which examines the extent to which race is part of [End Page 223] mentoring relationships. Then we provide preliminary findings to show that the survey items predict sense of belonging when they are used as a summative scale. We discuss implications for professionals who work with student affairs-based mentoring programs, who use assessment and evaluation in their work, and for undergraduate research mentors. LITERATURE REVIEW AND STUDY CONTEXT Positive mentorship perceptions relate to higher intent to persist (Baier et al., 2016) and sense of belonging (e.g., Apriceno et al., 2020). Apriceno and colleagues (2020) used multiple survey items to examine student engagement with mentors, but they were unable to consider how mentors incorporate Black, Indigenous and People of Color (BIPOC) students' minoritized statuses as part of the mentoring relationship. Other scholars have captured multiple factors in mentoring relationships but overlooked the importance of race in those relationships (Docherty et al., 2018). For instance, while Strayhorn and Terrell's (2007) study did not examine mentor demographics, it showed that mentoring relationships were more influential when they moved beyond personal, informal interactions and became research-focused. Black students who experienced research-focused relationships had higher college satisfaction (Strayhorn & Terrell, 2007) Prior literature has suggested that student affairs professionals must consider how mentoring relationships can support racially minoritized students. Rendón (1994) concluded that colleges and universities should "orient faculty … to the needs and strengths of culturally diverse student populations" because those faculty may then serve "as validating mentors for students who find the transition to college difficult" (p. 46). Recent qualitative studies have supported Rendón's early work. In a study of a single campus, Rodriguez (2020) highlighted the importance of using mentoring to promote students' racial efficacy. Additionally, a multicampus case study of students in STEM found that some mentors do, in fact, validate racially minoritized backgrounds (McCoy et al., 2015). Conversely, when faculty take a colorblind approach to mentoring, they tend to frame "their mentoring relationships in culturally racist ways" and, perhaps unintentionally, assume "a condescending, paternalistic attitude toward Students of Color" (McCoy et al., 2015, p. 236). This paper adds to prior literature by presenting a set of items that may be used to evaluate mentoring programs that incorporate discussion of race and ethnicity. BUILD PODER The study is part of a program evaluation of an NIH-funded project, Building Infrastructure Leading to Diversity (BUILD) Promoting Opportunities for Diversity in Education and Research (PODER) program at California State University, Northridge, a four-year comprehensive university. BUILD PODER (BP) is an established program that focuses on increasing diversity in biomedical and biomedically related fields. The program is designed to explicitly train faculty mentors and students from four colleges within the university (i.e., Health and Human Development, Social and Behavioral Sciences, Science and Mathematics, Engineering and Computer Science) about critical race theory (CRT). CRT is generally thought to include five tenets: (a) racism is "ordinary, not aberrational"; (b) racism serves the interest of "white-over-color ascendancy"; (c) race is socially constructed; (d) the dominant group alters notions of racial groups over time to suit needs; and (e) People of Color have unique insights and stories to tell (Delgado & Stefancic, 2017, pp. 8–9). [End Page 224] BP faculty mentor training in the first year consisted of a 16-hour face-to-face workshop related to the more familiar aspects of CRT—microaggressions and microaffirmations...