2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Topic: Scoping Review of Instruments for Measuring Doctoral Students' Mentoring Relationships with Advisors or Mentors.
Topic: Scoping Review of Instruments for Measuring Doctoral Students' Mentoring Relationships with Advisors or Mentors.
Background.
Pursuing a Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) is a profound scholarly journey that requires dedication, rigorous research, and consistent guidance from experienced mentors. Within this rigorous journey, the mentoring relationship emerges as a cornerstone, guiding the student through the intricacies of academic research and professional development (Nieto, 2016). For doctoral students in engineering, effective mentoring equips them with the necessary information and skills, fostering their evolution as both scholars and industry professionals (Sherman et al., 2021). Despite the evident importance of mentoring relationships, to the best of our knowledge, instruments developed to measure doctoral students’ perceptions of these relationships with their advisors or mentors have not been comprehensively reviewed. There remains limited insight into the available instruments, their quality, and most crucially, their validity, especially concerning students from diverse cultural backgrounds. Addressing this gap will empower researchers and educators to select the most suitable instrument to ascertain if their doctoral students perceive a positive relationship with their mentors. This is particularly vital during the early stages of doctoral training to determine if interventions are necessary. For doctoral students and their advisors, being familiar with these instruments offers a valuable tool for self-monitoring, ensuring the cultivation and sustenance of high-quality mentoring relationships and prompting necessary actions when needed.

Purpose
Using the methodology of a scoping review, the purpose of this study objective is to provide a comprehensive picture of the current state of instruments developed in scholarly literature to measure doctoral students' perceived mentoring relationships with their advisors or mentors. This involves outlining the theoretical frameworks underlying the instruments, detailing the instruments’ psychometric features, and identifying gaps in the existing literature.
Additionally, this research seeks to examine the suitability and potential adaptation of identified instruments, specifically within the context of engineering education. This evaluation will provide insights into whether the identified instruments can effectively measure mentoring relationships and whether any modifications need to be made to their applicability.
Scope/Method
The scoping review will adhere to the PRISMA extension for conducting scoping reviews, including formulating research questions, locating relevant studies, selecting appropriate sources, organizing and analyzing data, and presenting findings.
The review will include studies published in scholarly journals, ASEE conference proceedings, and gray literature. Search keywords will consist of "Ph.D. students," "mentoring relationships," "advisors," and "higher education." We will create search strings using boolean operators (AND, OR) to combine our key concepts. We will use synonyms and variations to capture a comprehensive set of relevant articles. For example: "Ph.D. students" OR "doctoral students" OR "graduate students”, “mentoring relationships" OR "mentoring programs" OR "mentorships”, “advisors" OR "supervisors" OR "faculty advisors" OR "academic mentors", OR "universities" OR "graduate schools".
The study will span electronic databases such as Scopus and Eric. Additionally, a manual examination of reference lists from pertinent research will be conducted. The inclusion criteria cover studies that validate instruments for measuring doctoral student perceptions of mentoring relationships, including both scale validation studies and applied research.