Running Head: ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY: MENTORSHIP 1 An Annotated Bibliography Exploring Research Related to Mentorship

Currently, many educators enter the teaching profession to be faced with the reality of highly challenging teaching assignments, possibly including a broad spectrum of courses requiring a great deal of preparation time, an unbalanced number of students with behavioral issues, or a lack of resources required to facilitate lessons. Because first-year teachers often find themselves focused only on " survival, " elevated rates of teacher turnover exist, especially in inner city schools. Thus, according to the authors, mentoring has received heightened national attention lately, and experimental design and statistical methods are increasingly being used to examine the effect of mentoring programs upon student achievement. Specifically in this study, student standardized test scores were investigated to reveal the effect of a mentoring program involving first-and second-year educators upon their students' achievement rates. Hierarchical linear modeling was employed, and a contrasting group used for comparison was made up of seasoned teachers in similar schools, consistent grade levels, and related content areas. More explicitly, the study involved data collected from 300 educators in grades 4 through 10, teaching 6,900 students in language arts, mathematics, and science from across the state of Alaska. Results indicate that even though the mentorship program did not coincide with comparable student test scores in classrooms of veteran and new teachers, mentees were able to help their students achieve much higher scores than expected, based on past research, in the areas of reading, writing, and science. In the subject of mathematics, those students in classrooms of first-and second-year mentored teachers performed on similar levels to those of more seasoned teachers. Therefore, mentoring undertaken as part of the Alaska Statewide Mentor Project Running Head: ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY: MENTORSHIP 3 demonstrates potential to begin narrowing the achievement gap often observed between students of new and veteran teachers. Although mentoring can serve as a vital component of educators' professional development and even correspond with increased teacher retention rates, logistical and financial setbacks frequently limit the level of interaction a mentee has with a mentoring teacher. The above-referenced investigation analyzed a school district initiative to facilitate increased interaction by enhancing traditional in-person mentoring with an electronic mentoring program. The program consisted of thirty elementary physical education teachers, each of whom participated in a year-long process that incorporated workshops, school visits, videotaped lessons, and online mentoring via chat rooms. Chat room postings provided necessary data, and these postings were analyzed for frequency of response and …