2026 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

The Benefit of Student Peer Mentors to Engineering Faculty Members Teaching in a Makerspace Classroom

Peer mentoring for undergraduate college students can take place in many forms. These include peers acting as tutors in drop-in learning support centers on college campuses, such as a writing center or quantitative reasoning/mathematics center (Carino, 2003). The support provided by peer tutors may also take a non-place-based approach, with peer tutors available during scheduled online structured or drop-in tutoring sessions. Peer tutors may be integrated into class meetings to support instruction as it takes place, as is the case with the learning assistant (Wilson & Arendale, 2001) and supplemental instruction (Dawson et al., 2014) programs. Common to these forms of peer support is the frequent focus on helping students solve problems with known solutions.

Peer mentors in makerspaces are not unique (Davishahl et al., 2022). However, what is unique to our makerspace-based peer mentoring program is that it takes place in a makerspace classroom that is used in the instruction of a first-year design course for engineering majors (Authors 2023, 2024). A portion of the course involves guided instruction to provide the students with foundational knowledge for exploration. In addition, the curriculum includes a culminating design project that engages students to work in small groups to apply the knowledge they have gained in the course. The project requires students to design and prototype a product that meets a set of criteria and constraints, which allows for a broad range of creative and unique products.

The courses are led by engineering faculty members and typically have around 49 students in a section. Given the challenges with providing support for 49 first-year engineering students engaged in hands-on, minds-on learning activities, peer mentors are hired to provide learning support in each section of the course. Further, the course has drop-in learning opportunities that are fully staffed by the peer mentors.
We have researched the impact of the peer mentors on the students in the course and the impact of being a peer mentor on the professional development of the peer mentors. In this project, we explored faculty members’ perceptions of the benefits and challenges of having peer mentors associated with the courses. Taking a phenomenological approach, we will interview course instructors to explore their experiences and thoughts about having peer mentors working with them to support student learning in their courses.

References
Authors. (2023).

Authors. (2024).

Carino, P. (2003). Power and authority in peer tutoring. In M. Pemberton &J. Kincaid (Eds.), The Center will hold: "Critical Perspectives on Writing Center Scholarship" (pp. 96-113). Logan: Utah State University Press

Davishahl, J., Boklage, A., & Andrews, M. (2022, August). Peer Mentors Forging a Path in Changing Times. In 2022 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition.

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.

Wilson, W., & Arendale, D. R. (2011). Peer educators in learning assistance programs: Best practices for new programs. In L. B. Williams (Ed.). Emerging issues and practices in peer education. (New Directions in Teaching and Learning, No. 133, pp. 41-53). San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. doi:10.1002/ss.383