RISE researchers Brandi Geisinger, Mari Kemis, and Arlene de la Mora, in conjunction with ISU faculty member Raj Raman, are working to learn about effective and ineffective mentoring strategies for student researchers. This work, funded, in part, by the NSF Center for Biorenewable Chemicals (CBiRC), originally stemmed out of the realization that mentoring was an essential component of undergraduate students’ experiences and successes in summer research programs.
The study has expanded from this original effort to include graduate students, who work closely with research mentors who have important roles in their degree programs. This work has been published in <i>Higher Education</i>, and presented at the Teaching Poster Symposium for the Center for Excellence in Learning and Teaching, the 2014 annual meeting of the AIChE, the 2015 annual meeting of the American Evaluation Association, the 2016 annual meeting of the American Evaluation Association, and the 2016 International Conference of Education, Research, and Innovation. This work has also been accepted for presentation at the 2017 annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association.