A Near-Peer Mentoring Framework for a CEE Curriculum: A Case Study

Abstract Many innovative pedagogical strategies, such as near-peer mentoring, have been developed to address challenges of the first-year college curriculum. Near-peer mentoring involves upper-level students mentoring lower-level students and has been shown to improve student outcomes, such as increased sense of belonging, increased confidence in abilities, and enhanced academic and professional growth. However, many of these programs primarily focus on the mentee and often overlook the mentor. Additionally, these programs can have high barriers to entry and may require extensive administrative support and infrastructure, especially for large classes. This paper presents a curriculum-level near-peer mentoring framework with the goals of (1) enhancing both mentors’ and mentees’ sense of belonging and identities as engineers, and (2) improving the quality of mentees’ semester-long team project solutions, conclusions, and final products. This framework was applied to a large first-year civil and environmental engineering (CEE) course with more than 210 mentees and uses more than 165 mentors primarily from fourth year CEE courses. Mentees and mentors were paired according to similar interests, and each pair met five times during a semester. After each mentoring session, both mentees and mentors completed mirrored surveys about their experiences. Both mentors and mentees somewhat agreed that the near-peer mentoring created a stronger sense of identity as a civil engineer, an increased sense of belonging, and higher quality project solutions, conclusions, and final products. Both groups rated the mentoring experience as beneficial with average self-reported scores of 3.7 out of 5, and both groups believed they helped their counterparts make connections with each other and to the project. Overall, this novel curriculum-level near-peer mentoring framework will allow all students to gain the many benefits of mentoring, and it scales well without additional faculty/teaching assistant (TA) resources.