The Impact of Peer Mentorship on Undergraduate Learning Attitudes and Academic Culture

Abstract

Undergraduate students often struggle with academic, social and institutional problems on their way into university learning, and peer mentorship has emerged as an essential pedagogy and student-support strategy in higher education. Peer mentoring can also have a beneficial impact on attitudes to learning, participation in learning, confidence, working in groups, and perceptions of the broader school environment, in addition to supporting academic learning. The present study is quantitative quasi-experimental which examines the relationship of peer mentorship with attitudes of the undergraduate learners and academic culture. The proposed empirical framework is a comparison between students who took part in a structured peer-mentorship scheme and those who got traditional academic support. This illustrates a sample of 240 undergraduate students who were split into two groups—mentorship group and comparison group—of 120 students each. The data were gathered by means of a structured questionnaire that included items assessing learning motivation, academic self-efficacy, collaborative learning orientation, classroom participation, help seeking behaviour, academic belonging and perceptions of academic culture. Assessment of academic performance was based on the grade point average (GPA) for the academic semester. Descriptive statistics, reliability analysis, independent-samples t-tests, correlation analysis, multiple regression analysis, and effect size estimation were utilized. The illustrative results show that the learning attitudes and academic culture indicators for the mentored students increased after mentoring. The mean academic-attitude scores rose from 3.21 to 4.08 for the mentored students, and from 3.25 to 3.48 for the comparison students. The mentorship group's Semester GPA rose from 6.42 to 7.31 while the comparison group's rose from 6.45 to 6.78. Based on regression analysis, the results showed that the perceived mentor support, mentor interaction frequency, and academic belonging have significance as predictors of learning attitudes. The results confirm the hypothesis that peer mentoring can be an academic-development program, not just an orientation program. The research advances the knowledge in the field of higher education by linking the concept of peer mentorship to individual learners' attitudes towards learning and the academic culture at the institute level.