Can showing shared interests improve student-teacher mentoring?
Sharing common interests only helps students who initially feel very different from their instructors feel closer to them, which indirectly improves their mentoring relationship.
Source
Amplifying similarity to promote college STEM instructor-student mentoring relationship quality: a cluster randomized trial
Study at a glance
- Design
- Other — Cluster-randomized classroom trial emailing shared instructor–student similarities
- N
- N=505 · 505 biology students in 15 classrooms across 13 US universities
- Population
- College biology students in semester-long research courses
- Outcome
- Perceived similarity and mentoring relationship quality, especially for initially dissimilar students
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Can showing shared interests improve student-teacher mentoring?
These passages occur verbatim in the stored paper text. They support the points listed below; they do not verify every statement in the explanation.
505 students in the final analytic sample
Participants who did not respond to at least one of the outcomes were removed from the analytic sample resulting in a final sample of 505 students clustered within 15 instructors.
15 biology college classrooms used for data collection
The data were collected from 986 undergraduates clustered within 15 biological science college classrooms (seven control, eight experimental) across 13 universities in the U.S.
What they did
The researchers studied 505 biology students across 15 classrooms at 13 universities during a semester-long research course. Classrooms were randomly assigned to either a control group or an intervention group where students received emails highlighting three personal similarities they shared with their instructor. At the start and end of the semester, students completed surveys measuring how similar they felt to their teacher and how they rated the quality of their mentoring relationship.
What they found
The intervention did not have a general, direct effect on all students' feelings of similarity or mentoring quality. However, for students who initially felt very different from their instructor, the intervention successfully increased their perceived similarity by the end of the term. This boost in perceived similarity subsequently led these students to report a higher-quality mentoring relationship.
The limits
What it doesn't show
The study suffered from baseline differences because classrooms assigned to the intervention had larger enrollment sizes than control classes, which generally dampens feelings of connection. It also relies completely on self-reported survey data, meaning it does not measure actual behaviors or academic outcomes like grades. Lastly, because the evaluation grouped diverse dimensions of mentoring support into a single score, it cannot show if specific types of guidance like career advice were improved more than others.
Key terms
- Course-based Undergraduate Research Experiences (CUREs)
- College courses that replace traditional lab exercises with authentic scientific research and collaboration.
- Cluster randomized design
- A research method where entire groups of people, such as classrooms, are randomly assigned to different conditions rather than individuals.
- Psychological similarity
- A deep-level perception of sharing common attitudes, beliefs, values, and personal interests with another person.
- Tripartite Integration Model of Social Influence (TIMSI)
- A framework explaining how individuals integrate into academic communities through self-efficacy, identity, and internalizing values.
- Moderated mediation
- A statistical phenomenon where the indirect effect of an intervention through a middle variable depends on a baseline characteristic of the participant.
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Common questions
Why did the intervention only work for some students?
Students who already felt similar to their instructors at the start of the semester had less room to change. The intervention was highly effective for students who initially felt they had nothing in common with their teachers, helping bridge that early psychological gap.
How did classroom size affect the results?
Larger classes generally make it harder for students to feel connected to instructors. Because the intervention classes happened to be larger than the control classes, this enrollment imbalance made it harder to see an overall positive effect of the intervention.
What kind of similarities did the students and teachers share?
The similarities were non-academic, focusing on everyday preferences like favorite weekend activities, personal values, or whether they had friends or family in the military.
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