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Friendly Mentor or Former Consultant: Peer Mentors in First-Year Engineering Courses

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Conference

2020 ASEE Virtual Annual Conference Content Access

Location

Virtual On line

Publication Date

June 22, 2020

Start Date

June 22, 2020

End Date

June 26, 2021

Conference Session

First-Year Programs: Peer Mentoring

Tagged Division

First-Year Programs

Page Count

13

DOI

10.18260/1-2--34691

Permanent URL

https://peer.asee.org/34691

Download Count

339

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Paper Authors

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Leila Keyvani Someh Northeastern University

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Dr. Keyvani is an assistant teaching professor in the First year engineering program.

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Brian Patrick O'Connell Northeastern University

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Dr. O'Connell is an assistant teaching professor in the First-Year Engineering group at Northeastern University. His undergraduate degree in Mechanical Engineering came from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst in 2006. He then worked for Kollmorgen Electro/Optical as a mechanical engineer developing periscopes and optronic masts. In 2011, he returned to academia at Tufts University, earning his MS and Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering for his work with low-cost educational technologies and his development and use of technologies to aid usage tracking in makerspaces to examine them as interactive learning environments.

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Kathryn Schulte Grahame Northeastern University

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Dr. Kathryn Schulte Grahame is an Associate Teaching Professor at Northeastern University and a member of the first-year engineering team. The focus of this team is on providing a consistent, comprehensive, and constructive educational experience that endorses the student-centered, professional and practice-oriented mission of Northeastern University.
She teaches the Cornerstone of Engineering courses to first-year students as well as courses within the Civil and Environmental Engineering Department. She is a recent recipient of the Outstanding Teacher of First-Year Students Award and is interested in research that compliments and informs her teaching.

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Jake Levi Northeastern University

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A Computer Science/Computer Engineering student at Northeastern University. Responsible for research with the First Year Engineering department.

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Whitney Elise Hansberry

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Vishrudan Swami

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Abstract

This complete evidence-based practice paper describes the two different peer-mentor techniques used in the project-based first-year Cornerstone of Engineering Courses at Northeastern University. In this work, ‘peer-mentors’ are defined to be undergraduate students who have recently - defined in this study as within the last five years - completed the course they are mentoring for and who serve as advisors and assist current students with the final project that is required for the course. In the first technique, the peer-mentors were required to serve as consultants during in-class group presentations. In this method, there were no assigned out of class interactions between the peer-mentors and the students. The second method required individual meet-time with the peer-mentors outside of the class. There were fewer in-class interactions between the peer-mentors and the students in this technique since peer-mentors were not obligated to attend all milestones. Specifically, we examined how peer-mentoring between students with little difference in age (all students are undergraduates) can improve the learning process as well as the transition from high school to university; if the use of a peer-mentor as a consultant on projects is more beneficial than just as a guide; and if requiring individual meet time instead of having peer-mentors in the classroom makes a difference to the perceived performance of the students. The effectiveness of both techniques was assessed by evaluating the results of an online survey sent out to former students of the courses. The methods utilized here confirm that mentoring makes for better perceived student performance and further details the effectiveness of each of the techniques in forming a better relationship between mentor and student.

Keyvani Someh, L., & O'Connell, B. P., & Schulte Grahame, K., & Levi, J., & Hansberry, W. E., & Swami, V. (2020, June), Friendly Mentor or Former Consultant: Peer Mentors in First-Year Engineering Courses Paper presented at 2020 ASEE Virtual Annual Conference Content Access, Virtual On line . 10.18260/1-2--34691

ASEE holds the copyright on this document. It may be read by the public free of charge. Authors may archive their work on personal websites or in institutional repositories with the following citation: © 2020 American Society for Engineering Education. Other scholars may excerpt or quote from these materials with the same citation. When excerpting or quoting from Conference Proceedings, authors should, in addition to noting the ASEE copyright, list all the original authors and their institutions and name the host city of the conference. - Last updated April 1, 2015