Abstract
Effective mentoring is a key component of academic and career success that contributes to overall measures of productivity. Mentoring relationships also play an important role in mental health and in recruiting and retaining students from groups underrepresented in STEM fields. Despite these clear and measurable benefits, faculty generally do not receive mentorship training, and feedback mechanisms and assessment to improve mentoring in academia are limited. Ineffective mentoring can negatively impact students, faculty, departments, and institutions via decreased productivity, increased stress, and the loss of valuable research products and talented personnel. Thus, there are clear incentives to invest in and implement formal training to improve mentorship in STEM fields. Here, we outline the unique challenges of mentoring in academia and present results from a survey of STEM scientists that support both the need and desire for more formal mentorship training. Using survey results and the primary literature, we identify common behaviors of effective mentors and outline a set of mentorship best practices. We argue that these best practices, as well as the key qualities of flexibility, communication, and trust, are skills that can be taught to prospective and current faculty. We present a model and resources for mentorship training based on our research, which we successfully implemented at the University of Colorado, Boulder, with graduate students and postdocs. We conclude that such training is an important and cost-effective step toward improving mentorship in STEM fields.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 9962-9974 |
| Number of pages | 13 |
| Journal | Ecology and Evolution |
| Volume | 8 |
| Issue number | 20 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Oct 2018 |
Funding
We are grateful to M. Deane Bowers for her support in initiating the mentoring seminar at CU Boulder. Cheryl Benedict of MORF Consulting generously provided advice throughout the development of the seminar and mediated the session on conflict resolution. We thank Cori Shaff, Alaina Nickerson, and Ann Piatt from CU Boulder Career Services for administering MBTI and StrengthsFinder evaluations and for leading the corresponding class discussion sessions. John Frazee from CU Faculty Affairs offered advice on email etiquette. Comments from the EBIO writing cooperative, M. Deane Bowers, Mike Breed, Nichole Barger, and Scott Taylor improved the manuscript. This project was supported by a NSF Graduate Research Fellowship to A. K. Hund. Publication of this manuscript was funded by the University of Colorado Boulder Libraries Open Access Fund. Finally, we would like to thank three anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful comments and feedback on this manuscript. Despite these challenges, we feel that evaluating mentorship and providing guidance for improvement, as well as a structure for accountability, are important steps forward in changing the culture of how mentorship is valued in STEM fields. Evaluations will need to be carefully designed and executed to address potential biases. Similar concerns surrounding teaching evaluations have led to the development of new metrics and evaluation techniques that better measure student success and are less prone to bias (Golding & Adam, 2016; Gormally, Evans, & Brickman, 2014; Miller, 2015; Wieman, 2015; Winchester & Winchester, 2014). Similar tools could be adapted for mentorship evaluations. Assessment methods will need to take a holistic view of student–faculty relationships. For tenure or promotion decisions, emphasis should be placed on evaluating patterns of successful or ineffective mentoring across several students instead of focusing on isolated incidents, although isolated incidents should be appropriately dealt with and used as learning experiences. We suggest that annual reviews, where both mentors and mentees report anonymously to an impartial third party about how their relationships are functioning, may be a step in the right direction. In this case, feedback can be given as a summary to each person with clear information about where they are doing well and areas that need improvement, paired with opportunities for training. Routine assessment and constructive feedback would increase transparency and help detect and resolve problems early, which would benefit both students and faculty. Furthermore, funding agencies that require mentoring statements for postdocs and graduate students as part of grant proposals (e.g., the National Science Foundation) could solicit feedback from mentors and mentees to evaluate the efficacy of the mentoring relationship at the conclusion of a project. Accumulated negative feedback could impact future funding decisions. This is similar to the adoption of Broader Impact standards.
| Funders |
|---|
| University of Colorado Boulder |
UN SDGs
This output contributes to the following UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)
-
SDG 3 Good Health and Well-being
Keywords
- STEM
- leadership
- mentoring
- professional development
- scientific practices
Fingerprint
Dive into the research topics of 'Transforming mentorship in STEM by training scientists to be better leaders'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.Cite this
- APA
- Author
- BIBTEX
- Harvard
- Standard
- RIS
- Vancouver