Transition in, transition out (TiTo): peer mentoring for sustainable development of first and third year psychology students [Final Report]

Transition in, transition out (TiTo): peer mentoring for sustainable development of first and third year psychology students [Final Report]

Transition In, Transition Out (TiTo) is a student peer-mentoring model designed to simultaneously support commencing and graduating students. Outcomes of the project include development of a sustainable, evidence-based approach for managing student transition and an improved student experience.
TiTo was developed from a sound pedagogical base, drawing on evidence about transition, learning and graduate attributes relevant to the discipline of psychology. As such TiTo brings together the following three overlapping frameworks to support the transition, engagement, and learning of psychology students:
• The Five Senses of Success framework (Lizzio, 2006), which summarise the major predictors of successful transition for first year students;
• Entwistle’s (2000) deep, surface and strategic approaches to learning; and
• The concept of psychological literacy, which is the capacity to adaptively apply psychological principles to meet personal, professional, and societal needs (Cranney & Dunn, 2011).
TiTo involves training final year students as mentors. Training and on-going support for mentors is embedded in a third year capstone course. The mentors work with first year students for eight weeks of the semester, facilitating work on assessment tasks and supporting transition to university. The mentoring package is designed to build positive change for both first year students and their third year mentors in the five senses of success, learning approaches and psychological literacies, thus better preparing students as they enter into the psychology discipline and as they prepare to graduate.
In order to evaluate TiTo, we implemented and tested the model in two different university contexts. The first was a large urban university, RMIT University. RMIT has a student cohort of more than 70,000 based on several campuses in urban Melbourne and off-shore. RMIT is part of the Australian Technology Network of Universities (ATN). The second university was the University of Southern Queensland (USQ), a smaller regional provider, with approximately 25,000 students spread across three campuses in the south-east of Queensland. USQ has a particular expertise in online delivery, with more than 75% of students studying off-campus. USQ is part of the Regional Universities Network (RUN).
The evaluation of TiTo undertaken for this project demonstrated the effectiveness of the model for both face-to-face delivery at RMIT University and in blended learning contexts at USQ. First year mentees and third year mentors at both universities rated their experience of mentoring as positive, with the majority of students in each group noting the experience had supported their work on assessment tasks and encouraged a sense of belonging. TiTo was also associated with improvements in aspects associated with success (senses of success) for first year students and mentors as well as positive change in deep, strategic and surface learning over the course of the semester. Increases in psychology literacy were noted for first year students and mentors at both universities. Data collected through focus groups support the value of this initiative. Not all first year students, however, found TiTo useful. Student feedback provides insight into who these students might be and how to better engage them in the process in subsequent iteration of the TiTo model.
Key deliverables of the current project can be considered in three broad categories.
• A set of resources and materials on peer mentoring. This includes the TiTo website, workbooks for both mentees and mentors, and a mentor training program.
• Dissemination of findings through academic and scholarly publications, workshops, and conference presentations.
• The creation of a community of stakeholders in the psychology higher education sector who are engaged to act on the project outcomes.
The outcomes and deliverables of the project can be found in a range of publications as well as on the project website: <http://emedia.rmit.edu.au/tito/>