Career-related peer mentoring: can it help with student development?

ABSTRACT Pre-education majors sometimes struggle to integrate smoothly into the role of a teacher candidate. Providing them with cross-age peer support through career-related mentoring may give them confidence and success in addition to providing them with personal, emotional, and academic growth. The purpose of this study was to analyze the relationship between career-related peer mentoring and student development, focusing specifically on the two roles pre-education majors played: those who were mentored by a graduate student and those who served as mentors to high school developing readers. We sought to answer the research question: How does a career-related peer mentoring relationship impact student development? Data sources were in the form of interviews, and the data analysis consisted of an inductive approach to the coding analysis utilizing grounded theory. The goal was to determine if comfort level, confidence, and self-efficacy would increase as a result of career-related peer mentoring.