Session T-16 - Topics: Undergraduate Research Mentoring; Strategies Supporting Equity or Inclusion; Qualitative Analysis of Group Work

This talk explores step-ahead mentoring within an upper-year undergraduate qualitative research methods course. The course revolves around a semester-long group project in which students gain hands-on experience in the full research cycle. To support learning, each group is paired with a graduate student mentor—someone a step ahead in their academic journey—who acts as a reflective guide and methodological sounding board. The talk draws on several years of testing this model, considering the benefits and challenges of step-ahead mentoring.

In Fall 2025, around 370 students at our large, research-intensive university responded to a survey inviting them to share a teaching strategy that supports equity or inclusion, based on their experiences in a university course. In this session, the research team will share the survey background, methodology, results, and discuss implications and lessons learned along the way. Session attendees will reflect on the results’ relevance to their courses and consider how the lessons learned may apply to future student outreach efforts in attendees’ respective local contexts.

We sampled 80 student reflections from an undergraduate computer science (CS) course, each drawn from authentic group project artifacts, and conducted a reflexive thematic analysis to identify recurring points of conflict in CS students’ collaborative experiences. The resulting themes were interpreted through Engeström’s Activity Theory, enabling a deeper analysis of these tensions and aiming to clarify what stands between CS curricula and the intended learning benefits of group work.