Mentoring expectation congruency, interaction, and psychosocial support in Missouri's agriculture teacher mentor program

Abstract

[ACCESS RESTRICTED TO THE UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI AT AUTHOR'S REQUEST.] The purpose of this study was to describe the relationship between mentoring Expectation Congruency, Scope of Interaction, and Psychosocial support received by beginning agriculture teachers participating in a state-supported formal mentoring program. The target population for the student was teachers participating in the Missouri Agricultural Education mentor/induction program. The accessible population consisted of Missouri agriculture teachers completing their first year of teaching during the 2012-2013 school year (n=33) and 2013-2014 school year (n=53). The researcher utilized components of five previously used instruments to ascertain psychosocial support received, mentoring expectation congruency, interaction scope and frequency, perceived similarity, program understanding, and proactivity as perceived by beginning teachers. An overall response rate of 95% (n=82) was achieved in this study. From the findings in this study, it was concluded that beginning teachers feels supported by their formal agriculture teacher mentor to a large extent in the friendship, acceptance, counseling, and role model functions. Beginning teachers felt supported to some extent in the Social function. Within those functions where beginning teachers felt supported to a large extent (friendship, acceptance, counseling, and role model), differences in mentoring expectation congruency explained a significant proportion of variance in support receive congruency explained a nonsignificant degree of variation in the social support construct. Interaction scope, as measured in hours of interaction per week, did not explain a significant proportion of variance in psychosocial support received when controlling for known covariates. This finding implies that differences in interaction time between mentor and beginning teacher does not necessarily lead to increased mentoring support received. Perceived similarity was the only covariate which explained significant proportions of variance in the Psychosocial support functions of acceptance, fr