Responding to Ninth-Grade Students via Telecommunications: College Mentor Strategies and Development over Time

The goal of this study was to expand our understanding of mentoring situated within electronic exchanges. Focusing on three graduate and five undergraduate mentors’ responses via telecommunications, we explored the strategies mentors used to make their reading and understanding of the texts explicit to their students, the responses mentors provided to demonstrate how students might revise, and mentors’ perceptions toward mentoring. Mentors responded to eight drafts from 24 ninth-grade students over an eight-week period, generating an average of 20 comments per student draft. Data collected included response grids of each mentor’s comments to students, interviews with mentors midway and at the end of the study, and journals kept by the mentors. Results showed that mentor pre-project expectations about responses they might make to students did not correspond to their actual responses, and that as the project progressed, mentor responses formed patterns corresponding to the draft of the students’ writing assignment. Additional differences were found based on mentors’ previous teaching experience, gender, and requests for feedback. Mentors expressed as their greatest difficulty not knowing which comments were perceived by students as most helpful