2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Near-peer instruction is the practice in which a more junior student is instructed by an individual who is in a position a few years senior to their own [1]. In the context of this study, we observe a case of near-peer mentorship occurring between undergraduate transfer students and graduate students. The mentorship takes place through NSF S-STEM Award # 1834081 Student Pathways for Engineering and Computing Transfers (SPECTRA) program. Under this program, graduate students, known as ACE Fellows, are tasked with creating and running an undergraduate research opportunity for the SPECTRA scholars. The scholars must take two semesters of this course to fulfill a requirement of their scholarship. Qualitative research was conducted by holding interviews, with both the scholars and the ACE Fellows, which were then coded using a pre-established codebook and then further coded using the Crisp and Cruz (2009) mentorship framework. This framework states that mentorship should accomplish four goals: (1) psychological and emotional support, (2) support for setting goals and choosing a career path, (3) academic subject knowledge support, and (4) specification of a role model [2]. Findings from this study include benefits to both the SPECTRA scholars and the ACE Fellows as a result of their near-peer mentoring relationship. For the SPECTRA scholars, the students were able to build a personal connection to the ACE Fellows and they considered the ACE Fellow’s course as a welcome change from their more “traditional” courses. Scholars felt that the ACE Fellows were able to relate to their struggles and were more understanding than other instructors. A result of this perception was that the students believed the ACE Fellows were able to provide better feedback and answers to their questions. Students discussed that they were inspired to seek out career paths, including graduate school, or at least consider how work in their class may relate to future careers. They also stated that the ACE Fellows were people that they looked up to and valued working with. Additionally, the students felt the ACE Fellows were able to help them build their confidence and abilities in both an engineering and professional sense. Benefits to the ACE Fellows centered around the chance for them to practice their teaching skills and test out ideas in a small, controlled classroom environment. For several Fellows, they had not had the opportunity, and likely would not have, to teach before joining SPECTRA. They also expressed that they had learned more about diversity, equity, and inclusion, as well as the struggles that transfer students may face through their pursuit of a four-year degree. In addition, the practical skills learned, such as course planning and syllabus construction, were also a value they felt they would not have received elsewhere.