Development and validation of an instrument for measuring mentoring in higher education

Higher education has been increasingly focussing on personalized learning and competence-based education. To support these institutional goals, mentoring programs have become an integral part of many educational curricula. Current empirical research shows positive effects on a variety of outcomes such as retention rates, knowledge acquisition, motivation, or academic persistence. However, most empirical studies are subject to one or more methodological issues. First, quantitative studies often lack or use vague operationalisations of the mentoring concept. Second, most measurement instruments used to evaluate mentoring are not theory-driven or fail to test and/or report reliability and validity indices. Therefore, this study aimed at developing and validating a theoretically sound instrument to measure mentoring in higher education. The current questionnaire was developed based on a recent literature review which defined and conceptualized mentoring. These findings informed our theoretical framework, which refers to five support types that formed the basis of a newly developed item pool. The final questionnaire consisted of 35 items and five subscales. First, an EFA was conducted on data that was collected at two higher education institutes
in June 2020 (n=200). Second, a CFA will be conducted on additional data of these schools to be collected in June 2021 (expected n≥200). Third, a cross validation will be performed with data collected at a third school in June 2021 (expected n≥85). The final results will be presented at the EARLI 2021 conference. This study hopes to establish a theory-driven, valid instrument that can support higher education practitioners to evaluate their mentoring program.