Evaluation of Brightside e-mentoring
8 February 2013
Mentoring provides the opportunity for young people to connect with relevant role models who can help them to explore their career ideas, their ideas about themselves and what they might be in the future. Brightside is a UK organisation which connects trained volunteer mentors with young people to develop mentoring relationships through e-mentoring. E-mentoring aims to help young people to tackle some of the difficulties they face in accessing higher education and the labour market and helps to build confidence and raise opportunity awareness.
The model that has been developed by Brightside has been taken up by a range of learning partners. Brightside has supported over 15,000 students through such projects over the last seven years. There is extensive positive feedback about the experience from both mentors and mentees but Brightside want to understand better why the experience works - which aspects of it are particularly powerful? - in order to support their volunteer mentors and tailor the experience for the benefit of future students.
Brightside have commissioned the International Centre for Guidance Studies (iCeGS) at the University of Derby to support their evaluation of the e-mentoring system. The evaluation aims to find out how the system is being used by partners and mentees and its impact upon them.
The research process includes a range of elements;
- Working alongside the team at Brightside to interrogate their data
- A self-completion online survey of mentees
- Interviews with key partners
- Analysis of the mentoring discourse
The results of this research will be presented to Brightside and their Board of Trustees to inform their future developments.
You can find out more about Brightside from their website
http://www.thebrightsidetrust.org/
If you would like to talk to us about this project please contact Siobhan Neary by email s.neary@derby.ac.uk or telephone 01332 591267.
