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Method
Participants and context
The perceptions of student teachers regarding the impact of mentoring on their student
teaching experience were obtained from 218 student teachers that were each assigned to a mentor
teacher in a K-12 public school. Student teachers were placed in locations according to their
content area preparation in elementary education, secondary education, or special education.
The student teachers completed the Mentee Perception of Student Teaching (MPST) survey upon
conclusion of their sixteen-week student teaching semester.
Data collection and analysis
This research aimed to articulate student teachers’ perceptions of their mentoring
experiences in student teaching, and to link it to the five factors of effective mentoring outlined
by Hudson (2007). For this study, student teacher perceptions of mentoring were obtained using
the Mentoring Perceptions of Student Teaching (MPST) instrument’s five-point Likert scale (i.e.,
strongly disagree = 1, disagree = 2, uncertain =3, agree = 4, strongly agree = 5). Incomplete
responses were extrapolated using a linear trend of the subjects’ other responses (Kuzma &
Bohnenblust, 2001). An analysis of variance (ANOVA) was completed along with obtaining
mean scale scores and descriptive statistics. The student teachers’ responses represented 64% of
the total student teaching cohort. All responses were gathered from student teachers at the
conclusion of their student teaching experience.
SPSS 16 was used to calculate mean scores for each of the 34 survey items. The results
were reported descriptively according to the five mentoring factors that were embedded within
the statements on Hudson’s MPST survey. Also obtained was a cumulative score for this section
of the survey, and it was used to compare the mean difference between the co-teaching and the
non-co-teaching groups. The level of significance to which this study was held is <.05.
The five mentoring factors include: personal attributes, system requirements, pedagogical
knowledge, modeling, and feedback. Items on the instrument have been empirically justified
(Hudson et al., 2005). Data was subjected to confirmatory factor analysis, which defined a
relationship between the items assigned to each factor. Cronbach alpha scores greater than .70
are considered acceptable for internal reliability of each factor (Peterson, 1994). SPSS also
generated other descriptive statistics (i.e., percentages, mean scores, and standard deviations) that
were used for item analysis.
Results and Discussion
The five factors, namely, personal attributes, system requirements, pedagogical
knowledge, modeling, and feedback, had Cronbach alpha scores of .93, .81, .95, .91, and .91,
respectively with mean scale scores ranging from 4.20 to 4.60. Correlations and co-variances of
the five factors were statistically significant (p <.001). Eigen values greater than one indicated a
relationship between factors and associated items and the Eigen value range for this study was
2.19 – 7.53. This was further signified by the percentage of variance attributable to each factor.
For instance, there was 73% of variance assigned to the factor personal attributes; the percentage
of variance range for all factors was 64%-73% (See Table 1).