2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Peer mentoring programs have become common on college campuses. Frequently, peer mentors are hired to work in writing centers or math learning centers to tutor students on learning. Peer mentors have also been integrated into courses such as with the Learning Assistant (Barrasso & Spilios, 2021) and supplemental instruction (Dawson et al., 2014) programs. It is common for university-based makerspaces to hire students to be peer mentors who can help those coming into the space accomplish their goals.

Unique to our program is hiring peer mentors (who are engineering majors) to support engineering students enrolled in a first-year design course taking place in a makerspace classroom. The course is structured to meet once a week for two hours. The typical course has 40 students and is led by a single instructor who is a member of the university engineering faculty. Thus, the student-to-faculty ratio in the space is 49 to 1. In the course, students work in small groups (usually four students) as they engage in assignments designed to help increase their knowledge of engineering. Some of the activities are scripted (e.g., circuit building), while others require the students to design and prototype a product following general guidelines. Thus, the students learn about engineering through design, prototyping, testing, refining, rebuilding, and retesting.

Given the high level of student engagement in activities in the course that they may not be familiar with (e.g., building prototype circuits using breadboards, using power tools), there is a need for additional learning support beyond what a single instructor can provide. Thus, the college hires a cadre of peer mentors (also undergraduate engineering students) to work with the students in the courses and support students in the makerspace classroom during open lab hours. The integration of peer mentors into the course has been taking place for several years. We are working with 15 undergraduate engineering majors this semester, preparing them to be peer mentors and researching how their mentoring experiences are influencing their professional development.

We recognize the potential for mentoring to benefit the mentors (Smith & Nadelson, 2016). However, there is a gap in the research detailing how peer mentors working with students in makerspace classrooms in undergraduate engineering may enhance their perceptions and knowledge of themselves as both professionals and engineers. To address this gap, we are gathering data from the peer mentors using both surveys and semi-structured interviews. Our survey contains ten free response items designed to elicit the thoughts of the peer mentors about how mentoring other students in the first-year design course taking place in the makerspace has influenced their knowledge and perceptions of themselves as developing into engineers.

We also developed our interview protocol to gather the narrative of the peer mentors to empirically document their lived experiences as mentors and the impact their mentoring experiences have on their professional and engineering identity development (Nadelson et al., 2017; Villanueva & Nadelson, 2017).

In our final report, we will detail the specific activities of peer mentors and how these activities enhanced their understanding of engineering, their thoughts about being a professional engineer, and their engineering and professional identities.

References

Barrasso, A. P., & Spilios, K. E. (2021). A scoping review of literature assessing the impact of the learning assistant model. International Journal of STEM Education, 8, 1-18.

Dawson, P., van der Meer, J., Skalicky, J., & Cowley, K. (2014). On the effectiveness of supplemental instruction: A systematic review of supplemental instruction and peer-assisted study sessions literature between 2001 and 2010. Review of educational research, 84(4), 609-639.

Nadelson, L. S., McGuire, S. P., Davis, K. A., Farid, A., Hardy, K. K., Hsu, Y. C., ... & Wang, S. (2017). Am I a STEM professional? Documenting STEM student professional identity development. Studies in Higher Education, 42(4), 701-720.

Smith, J., & Nadelson, L. (2016). Learning for you and learning for me: Mentoring as professional development for mentor teachers. Mentoring & Tutoring: Partnership in Learning, 24(1), 59-72.

Villanueva, I., & Nadelson, L. (2017). Are we preparing our students to become engineers of the future or the past. International Journal of Engineering Education, 33(2), 639-652.