By Abhijeet Sudhir
Economic Times reported STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Math) career growth of 44% in India between 2016 to 2019 and by 2023 India will be home to the largest population of software developers (Bhattacharyya, 2020).
Despite this rapid growth only 26% of students will pursue college education in STEM.
Realizing the need to cultivate scientific temper amongst young minds, Atal Innovation Mission (AIM) launched the Atal Tinkering Laboratories (ATL) Program (AIM, 2021) to impact one million children.For low-income students, the ATL Program is the only way to learn STEM skills (ATL Program, 2019).
Research has shown that strong mentorship increases the probability that a student will pursue a college education (Nanda, 2019 & Hom, 2014). Unfortunately, Indian mentorship programs are not able to foster an environment at the same level as those of western countries.
Having a deeper understanding of barriers will help us design the right interventions to make India STEM Mentoring more scalable and effective.
ATL’s purpose is to foster hands-on learning through its ATL labs and its “Mentors of Change” program. However, a bulk of mentoring time is spent teaching concepts through classroom lectures. In this context, Flipped Classroom Approach through its highly structured approach could play a pivotal role in saving time for meaningful mentoring (Tucker, 2012 & Subramaniam, 2016 & Brame, 2020).
In order to identify the STEM mentoring barriers, a two-pronged approach was undertaken leveraging qualitative (interviews) and quantitative (survey) studies.
Insights from In-person Interviews (Qualitative Study)
For the qualitative study, standard sets of questions were presented to leading experts/leaders of large Indian mentorship organizations. There was strong consensus around huge mentoring strides in the past decade as a result of increased research work, NGOs/Government focus, CSR funds and globalization of the workforce. Despite the promising inroads, 50% of the mentoring relationships do not sustain beyond four months. While there were differences in points of view around barriers, a common set of barriers emerged from the interviews including:
1. Unstructured mentoring and inadequate mentor training/competency
2. Commitment challenges
3. Ineffective time management (inadequate leverage of technology, weekend only focus, time wasted due to travel)
4. Scaling challenges without compromising quality of mentorship
3. Insights from Online Survey (Quantitative Study)
For the quantitative study, a survey was designed for both mentors and mentees to identify barriers, root causes and possible solutions. The survey was presented to mentors and mentees from Mentors of Change (AIM – Government of India) and the Learning Links Foundation (LLF) network. In total, there were a total of 270 survey responses (50 mentors and 220 mentees).
Over 85% of the mentors and mentees (Figure 1) believe that STEM will play a significant role in the future of India and it is important to encourage and pursue a career in STEM.
Investments and the role played by ATL labs in fostering STEM was acknowledged by more than 90% (Figure 2) of survey participants. Across 91% of mentors there was a strong consensus on the role of mentoring in fostering STEM careers for underprivileged children.
As shown in Figure 3, only 34% of mentor’s and 32% of mentees (Figure 4) have clarity around the role of mentors and mentees. Mentees view mentors as an extension of the classroom teacher, continuing to fuel the gap in value perception of mentorship (also noted during in-person interviews).
Figure 4 – Mentees views on the clarity of their role and mentor
Figure 5, shows time constraints as the main barrier also identified through the interviews, which 63% of participants said affected them. Along with that, 45% of participants said they faced issues around the lack of structure in the mentoring relationship. These barriers also seemed to affect the enrolment rates of potential mentors (Figure 6), as 62% of the mentors said that time constraints kept their peers from volunteering and 51% of them said that the volunteers were nor adequately trained, another barrier identified through the interviews.
Figure 5 – Mentor challenges
Figure 6 – Challenges affecting mentorship enrolment rates
5 Conclusions
Mentors and mentees agree that STEM will play an important part in the future of India, which stresses the importance of programs like ATL. It becomes more important to ensure STEM mentoring is effective as evidenced by a structured approach, better preparation, consistency of meetings and time management.
Both studies support the existence of the challenges for effective STEM mentoring namely; Time commitment, Unstructured mentoring and Time management/constraints. Study presents a strong disconnect around roles/expectations due to time constraints and unstructured mentoring. This should be embraced as part of the structured training program for the mentors along with templates/guides leveraged during the mentoring journey.
Mentee and mentor concur on preparations (Figure 7, 8) outside the mentoring session using the Flipped Classroom approach (expressed during qualitative study). Few challenges were identified by experts including students having additional responsibilities at home (cleaning, cooking etc) and technology challenges. Modified Flipped Classroom for Indian context will provide a lot of value to overcome time management and unstructured mentoring barriers (Sandhu, 2019).
Figure 8 – Mentees views on Flipped Classroom Approach
Figure 9 – Potential solutions for effective STEM Mentoring
While the Flipped Classroom approach could alleviate many of the problems identified, further gaps can be closed through innovative technology solutions (Figure 9).
Light-weight mentoring platforms could enable online sessions over the week followed by shorter weekend in-person sessions. Having a structure established within the platform allows for mentoring continuity even during churn. The platform can offer Nudge and other reinforcement/reminders around homework and other activities.
In conclusion, India has witnessed large mentorship strides in the last decade but with sustained interventions around mentoring structure, time management and time constraints – it will not only complement Government and Corporate pursuits in enabling more underprivileged pursue STEM but it will be mutually reinforcing.
(About the Author: Grade 11 student, The International School Of Bangalore, Bangalore.)
References
Bhattacharyya, R. (2020), STEM jobs in India increase 44% in 2016-2019, shows data. Available: https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/jobs/stem-jobs-in-india-increase-44-in-2016-2019-shows-data/articleshow/73228502.cms (January 13, 2020).
Nanda, P. (2019), India’s higher education student population grows by 8 lakh. https://www.livemint.com/education/news/india-s-higher-education-student-population-grows-by-8-lakh-hrd ministry-1569081600712.html (September 21, 2019).
Hom 2014 – Hom, E. (2014), What is STEM Education?. Available: https://www.livescience.com/43296-what-is-stem-education.html (February 12, 2014)
Diversity in STEAM Magazine (), Mentorship Leads to Better STEM Outcomes for Disadvantaged Students. Available: https://diversityinsteam.com/2019/03/mentorship-stem-disadvantaged-students/
AIM 2021, About Atal Innovation Mission. (n.d.). https://aim.gov.in/overview.php
ATL Program 2019, The Atal Tinkering Handbook [PDF]. (2019, January). Niti Aayog
Tucker, B. (2012), The Flipped Classroom. Online instruction at home frees class time for learning. Available: http://www.msuedtechsandbox.com/MAETELy2-2015/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/ the_flipped_classroom_article_2.pdf ( 2012)
Subramaniam 2016 – Subramaniam, Suwarna Rani, and Balakrishnan Muniandy (2016). “Concept and Characteristics of Flipped Classroom.” International Journal of Emerging Trends in Science and Technology, Oct. 2016, doi:10.18535/ijetst/v3i10.01.
Brame 2020 – Brame, C. (2020). Flipping the Classroom. Available: https://cft.vanderbilt.edu/guides-sub-pages/flipping-the-classroom/ (2013).
Sandhu 2019 – Sandhu, S., Sankey, M., & Donald, P. (2019), Developing a flipped classroom framework to improve tertiary education students’ learning engagements in India. Available: https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ EJ1220772.pdf (2019).
