Collaborative Research: EFRI-REM Mentoring Catalyst 2.0

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Research has shown that meaningful, positive, and sustained mentoring in the STEM fields have significant impacts on broadening the participation in STEM fields, specifically through the added retention of underrepresented minorities, women, and persons with disabilities. The EFRI Research Experience and Mentoring (EFRI-REM) program has excelled in providing research opportunities to underrepresented students, and the unique mentoring component of the program has the potential to increase the retention and success of undergraduate engineering students. The goal of this project is to build an EFRI-REM mentoring community composed of current and future STEM mentors that will (1) facilitate meaningful mentor training that will positively impact research mentee training, (2) strengthen mentor-mentee relationships, and (3) construct a web-based portal for EFRI-REM mentors to share ideas and mentoring best practices. The project plans to measure the impact of the EFRI-REM mentor community has on the outcomes of EFRI-REM students, and the findings will be shared with the EFRI-REM participants and the research community. The focus of this project is on building and sustaining an EFRI-REM Community of Practice (COP), where current and future EFRI-REM mentors are trained to be meaningful mentors, build a strong mentor-mentee relationship, and actively train additional mentors at their home institutions. Using web-based curriculum and virtual webinars the community of EFRI-REM mentors will actively participate in constructing mentoring philosophies and developing mentoring best practices that can be utilized in mentoring unique demographics of students. The COP method will provide experienced and new mentors a forum to discuss ongoing mentoring issues and positive outcomes of successful mentoring strategies. The train-the-trainer model is integral in this project, as the trained mentors will be coached in offering mentor training to faculty and students beyond the EFRI-REM program, thus widely disseminating highly impactful mentor training beyond the EFRI-REM program. The mentoring materials developed by this project and EFRI-REM mentor COP will serve as resources to facilitate meaningful mentoring of diverse groups, potentially having positive impacts on retention of engineering graduate students and encouraging undergraduate students to purse advance degrees in engineering.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.