Increasing student persistence in STEM fields has been a major concern for many colleges and universities in recent years. Rensselaer has been building a peer-to-peer persistence program with funding from HHMI for the past 3+ years. Traditional STEM persistence programs often target student groups such as the under-represented minority (URM) and/or the socioeconomically disadvantaged.<br/>Rensselaer’s program is unique because we engage all incoming freshman students who are taking any one of the three prerequisite courses for all science and engineering majors, namely, Calculus 1, Chemistry 1, and/or Physics 1. Our program supports students by helping them establish and build small learning communities with one mentor and up to ten students. In our freshman chemistry program, we served over 750 incoming freshman students in the Fall of 2017 with over 55 mentors. Due to the large number of mentors involved, five senior mentors with extensive mentoring experience were selected to help faculty in training, scheduling, and other administrative tasks. Each mentor is required to meet with two groups of students each week to review academic content and to develop time management and stress coping skills. Preliminary results on student grades, retention rate, and graduation rate have been encouraging and will be presented.<br/>One of the many ways to improve the effectiveness of the program was to develop a dashboard for mentors. Unfortunately, university policy prohibits undergraduate mentors from learning their mentees' actual grades. Therefore, the dashboard was carefully designed to follow the policy but yet still provide mentors and faculty valuable information on the performance of both the mentors and students. The dashboard was designed to monitor the effectiveness of each mentor and the performance of their mentoring sections. Actual test scores were masked by three different performance levels – “Exceeds Standards”, “Meets Standards”, and “Needs Improvement”. The main function for the dashboard is to identify both the high and the poor performing student groups. Mentors can learn from each other by sharing their challenges as well as success stories. In addition, they can utilize the dashboard to quickly identify students who may require additional help.

Designing and implementing a dashboard to monitor mentor performance for a STEM persistance program

255th National Meeting (2018)

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