Mentoring is a green space
(Generated by Copilot)
Students typically approach research assignments with measures of puzzlement, anxiety, and boredom. They procrastinate, they struggle with understanding the professor's requirements, and they take far too long trying to get their citations right. Many of them feel like they've been sent out like lambs to the slaughter while, at the same time, struggling to stay alive long enough to deliver the product. Few of them enjoy the process. Most of them dread it and do it badly.
This might seem to be a very pessimistic view, but it is reinforced by decades of working with students who readily unload their fears and helplessness on we librarians.
Their problem is this: They have to deliver a product that meets your expectations. While we educate students for many aspects of their studies, we don't educate them to become skilled researchers. Here, we expect them to learn by doing and to perform by submitting a stellar project. We penalize them when they disappoint us.
A mentoring approach turns all this on its head and opens opportunities for growth and refreshment. It is genuinely a green space. The supreme goal in research mentoring is not to judge performance but to train the process so that minds are engaged, research problems are articulated, relevant resources are assembled, and solutions are sought. A mentor essentially builds a thinker, a researcher, a writer. In the larger scheme, you as mentor enable your student to become an active practitioner in your discipline rather than merely serving as an empty pot to be filled with knowledge.
As Scott Carlson wrote in a Chronicle of Higher Education post, "Success is not a hoop, but a journey.." (The Edge, September 11, 2024)
Slides for Section 3:
1. Focus on the process. What is the student doing to accomplish each segment of your faceted (scaffolded) set of assignments? What processes are working? What are not? Your set of goals is the measure of successful process or of incomplete skill development.
| "Learning is found in the process, and too much of what we already ask students to do does not take the journey into account." - John Warner ("Calling BS on the AI Education Future." Inside Higher Education, July 10, 2024) |
2. Aim for student competency. If you have a benchmark for great project, use that to evaluate student work and provide guidance for improvement. But be careful not to set the benchmark so high that few students can reach it.
3. Make your comments on student work extensive and genuinely formative. Comments should not so much be, "This research question doesn't work for the issue you are trying to address," but "This research question focuses more on finding information than solving a problem. Here are some examples of problem-based questions that you could consider." All mentoring should point to a means for improvement rather than simply identifying error.
4. Give students a path to overcome deficiencies. This means that you should offer one or two opportunities for revision and resubmission if a student doesn't meet your benchmark the first time.
5. Be their lifeline in the research project process. Do you invite emailed questions and answer them promptly (a tall order for a busy professor, to be sure, but very important)? Are you approachable?
6. Let students feel your confidence in them. Most of them can become better researchers if you show yourself to be an encouraging mentor rather than a frightening judge. The mentor role, of course, is natural to TWU profs, who live to see our students succeed and flourish.
1. The Research Question
Example One:
Student: "How did Ladd's premillennial eschatology, particularly his views on the Kingdom of God, contrast with the dispensationalist perspectives of his era?" Professor: "You can look this up in writings of scholars who have already done this work, so it isn't a viable research question. It's a bit too easy to answer. Find some issue in Ladd, e.g. "To what extent does Ladd’s 'Presence of the Future" view of the Kingdom accord with biblical teaching?' Or possibly, 'How valid is Ladd’s critique of Dispensationalism?' You need a question that may have several points of view around it or calls for a non-obvious solution. Let me know if you need more help with this."
Example Two:
Student: "How does a school make mental health more accessible for students with disabilities?" Professor: "Change the word 'does' to 'can' to make the question call for more problem-solving. You want to seek a solution to the problem rather than just describing what is happening now. Otherwise OK."
2. Search Skills
Example One:
Student: Used search terms: Education System, Mental Health, Adolescents but searched them separately, thus not finding the point at which those concepts intersected. Professor: "Try combining your search words like your research question does, e.g. 'mental health AND adolescents AND school*.' You want to find resources that connect all the elements described in your research question."
Example Two:
Student: Used the following searches: Keyword Search One: Church* AND Aborti* AND Counsel* / Subject heading(s): Abortion, Counseling, Abortion Counseling, Abortion – religious aspects – catholic church. Professor: Keywords OK, but "Post-abortion counseling" would be a better choice for your initial keyword search to match what you are asking in your research question. Subjects OK, but limit to the most relevant ones. 'Abortion,' 'Counseling' as separate subjects are not as relevant as 'Abortion Counseling' as a single subject term.
3. Gathered Resources
Example One:
Student citation: Bunger, A. C., Maguire-Jack, K., Yoon, S., Mooney, D., West, K. Y., Hammond, G. C., & Kranich, C. (2021). Does mental health screening and assessment in child welfare improve mental health service receipt, child safety, and permanence for children in out-of-home care? An evaluation of the gateway call demonstration. Child Abuse & Neglect, 122. https://doi-org.twu.idm.oclc.org/10.1016/j.chiabu.2021.105351. Professor: "This citation covers child mental health, but your research question focuses on mental health of children with disabilities. This article does not cover disabilities and should be replaced by an article that does, e.g. O’Rourke, R. H., Brown, D., Martin Ginis, K. A., & Arbour-Nicitopoulos, K. P. (2022). An examination of the mental health status of Canadian children and youth with disabilities. Canadian Journal of Community Mental Health, 41(4), 75–103."
Example Two:
The student presented a reference list on the issue of remediating the challenge of homeless youth. Professor: "All of these deal with homelessness, but about a third of them don’t address youth directly. Try the search again, being sure that the following construction is part of your initial search terminology: (youth OR teen* OR adolescen*)."
1. A focus on process is not easy to achieve. We are content-oriented and have been ever since the lecture became standard fare centuries ago. Yet we have students ill-prepared to navigate today's information landscape, and thus we need to elevate process to a prominent place alongside content.
2. Your students, despite the fact of their limited abilities, may be resistant to being developed as researchers. This seems counterintuitive, but arises because students tend to overestimate their abilities (the so-called Dunning-Kruger Effect), don't especially like research projects, and don't believe it is possible to improve their skills appreciably. Press on with your mentoring regardless. Your students will thank you later.
3. The university's undergraduate student learning outcome, "Cognitive Complexity," states that students should develop "skills, including critical and creative thinking, quantitative and qualitative reasoning, communication, research, and information literacy." The graduate statement says the students should "show ability to carry out discourse and research as an active member of a discipline; demonstrate the ability to “undertake inquiry and analysis, to solve problems with a high degree of innovation, divergent thinking and risk taking”" Question: How do we develop those skills in our students? A key tool for this instruction is the assigned research project, but only if we use it as a mentoring vehicle.
4. With the rise of generative AI, the stakes are higher. We absolutely do not want our students avoiding the development of their cognitive abilities by turning research project production over to a bot. Faceting/segmenting assignments so that we can evaluate smaller portions and interact with students on their process is one way to offset at least some of the damaging uses of AI.
5. Mentoring works. In the first class of any course I teach, I explain my educational approach - support, mentoring, opportunity for resubmission - and the whole mood of the class lifts. Think about it - How do you develop an Olympic athlete or a plumber? Mentoring, apprenticeship. If we are not doing as much to allow our students to be strong and able handlers of information to advance knowledge, we are failing them.
6. All of this may seem too disruptive to your teaching plans and involve too much work on your part. These are valid issues. The question, however, is this: How important to their education is development of cognitive and research ability in our students? We know that students are real people, not empty pots to fill. They must function intelligently in an increasingly information confused world. We have the opportunity to help them do that through our mentoring. It's worth the effort and not nearly as disruptive to your teaching as you might believe.
Land Acknowledgement
Trinity Western University's Langley campus is located on the traditional, ancestral, unceded territory of the Stó:lō people. We are grateful for the opportunity to live, work, and learn on this land.
