Leadership
Rebecca Covarrubias, CRL Research Director, Associate Professor, Psychology
Graduate Student Researchers
Jada Cheek, PhD Student, Psychology
Stephanie Hertel, PhD Student, Education
Daniel Rodriguez Ramirez, PhD Student, Psychology
Katherine Quinteros, PhD Student, Psychology
About
This program conducts a systematic study of culturally-sustaining practices within undergraduate research mentoring programs. The process we are developing can later be scaled to use for undergraduate, graduate, and faculty-focused mentoring programs across disciplines.
There are two main goals for this project. The first goal is to develop a research-informed conceptual framework that identifies essential components for building structures of support in mentoring programs that serve minoritized students. There is a robust literature on mentoring, but less published empirical and theoretical work on critical mentoring that engages in anti-racist, equity-minded liberatory practices. Doing a systematic review of such literature and distilling essential features of this type of mentoring in a succinct, accessible brief will inform critical evaluation of similar programs and institutional practices. The second goal is to build robust evaluation tools that assess these components and then pilot these assessment tools with various mentoring programs across the nation, which includes many UCSC programs and all NRAO-funded REU programs in Astronomy.
We expect to have our pilot assessments of the GANAS, CR/DD, and NRAO REU Astronomy programs completed by the end of the 2024-25 academic year and hope to continue to build and refine our assessment framework in the coming years with a view towards creating a process model that can be used across campus and nationally.