RPI has been developing mentoring programs to increase student success in its STEM courses. These programs are designed to identify students struggling with the subject material, early on, and encourage these at-risk students to reach out for and accept help. The first program, the I-Persist Mentor Program, was developed specifically to accomplish this by using peer group mentors working with small groups of mentees to intervene early on in courses like Chemistry I, Physics I, and Calculus I. While largely successful, there is still a significant segment of the at-risk population who did not take advantage of the group sessions. We then augmented the Chemistry I-Persist Mentor program with the Cyber Mentoring Program, an online mentor program offering the anonymity of the computer to computer interface. With this program, mentees would log in, without exposing themselves to their classmates. They can ask for help by typing in their questions. They then listen and watch as peer group mentors answer their questions “live” online. We will present the mechanism for this on-line and interactive approach along with the preliminary findings from our two semester pilot program.<br/>

Cyber mentoring to increase persistence for students in STEM

255th National Meeting (2018)

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