by Virginia Nelson,
ELL teacher, Chas. F. Tigard Elementary School,
Once students are old enough to express themselves clearly in writing, I question the usefulness of a likert tool in rating effectiveness. So why am I recommending it? In these data-driven days, it provides an easy way to produce data without causing mentor or mentee to spend too much time ruminating about what the responses mean. Would I use it? Yes, but only to generate data. Why? Because everyone is collecting data. If you're not collecting or providing data, you're not playing by the rules.
In an informal roundtable at the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry, successful Latina female women who work in the sciences responded to inquiries about their mentors. The nature of their responses, which were extremely valuable, makes it unlikely that I would trust any responses not derived from oral or written individual responses.
There are two beneficiaries of such information. The mentors' supervisor(s) need to know if they've properly assigned the mentoring task. Of course the mentors need to know if they've been effective. The likert tool allows blurring of the specifics of the mentoring. Simple written or spoken statements such as the answers to "What two effective practices did your mentor use that helped you the most?" give more information than twenty minutes of picking among the five buttons on the scale.
