Peer mentoring for multiple levels of nursing students.

IMAGINE being a beginning nursing student with no prior health care experience and not knowing if it is appropriate to awaken certain nursing home residents to provide activities of daily living care (ADLs). Anxiety and apprehension have been observed in beginning nursing students as a recurrent pattern, particularly when students are assigned to resident care for the first time. To reduce student anxiety, and to partially fulfill senior students' service activity, a peer mentoring strategy was developed, pairing beginning students with seniors on the first day of providing ADL care to nursing home residents. The success of this strategy led to expansion of the program and scholarly inquiry about student and program outcomes. The study described in this article was designed to uncover the experience of peer mentoring in a baccalaureate nursing program. Sprengel and Job (2004) describe a peer-mentoring teaching strategy that paired 30 freshmen enrolled in a medical-surgical clinical nursing course with sophomore-level students. While this experience was found to he positive for both groups of students, the sophomores (the mentors) rated the peer mentoring experience higher than the freshmen (the mentees). The sophomores reported increased self-confidence and conveyed that peer mentoring made them appreciate how much more they had progressed since their beginning courses (p. 247). Mentoring early in a nursing program has been shown to reduce student anxiety, provide a positive learning environment (Locken & Norberg, 2005: Sprengel & Job, 2004; Yates, Cunningham, Moyle, & Wollin, 1997); boost self-confidence (Sprengel & Job; Yates et al.); lessen confusion; and increase student interaction at various levels of the curriculum (Becket & Neuwirth, 2002; Sprengel & Job). Improved retention rates and satisfaction among first-semester clinical nursing students have also been observed with early mentoring (Colalillo, 2007; Dorsey & Baker, 2004). Based on their research, Sword, Byrne, Drummond-Young, Harmer, and Rush (2002) recommend providing opportunities for students to be mentored during their formative years of nursing school. Method and Data Analysis This exploratory research employed a descriptive, phenomenological design using multiple focus groups to uncover nursing student experiences with peer mentoring. Approximately 20 senior nursing students were randomly paired with beginning nursing students for a period of two hours at the time of the beginners' first clinical experience. The paired students provided nursing home residents with ADL care. Activities took place with the full knowledge and consent of the nursing home and were under direct clinical supervision by faculty. Several days after the mentoring activity, students were asked to review and sign an informed consent if they were interested in participating in one of four focus groups. The discussions were taped, transcribed, and reviewed by the researchers for accuracy. Data were analyzed according to Giorgi and Giorgi's (2003) method. The researchers read the transcriptions solely to derive a description of the experience as captured in the words of the participants. Transcribed materials were then re-read and marked wherever a marked transversal of content meaning arose. Gradually, these siphoned units of text were color-coded into groupings based upon seemingly similar meanings. Researchers then determined summative narrative descriptions of the mentoring experience. The Experience as Seen by the Mentees Mentees overwhelmingly perceived the mentoring experience to be a positive one. They reported feeling less anxious during their second week at the nursing home, which several students directly attributed to the mentoring experience. REASSURANCE Having the senior student present was reassuring. One mentee compared it to a security blanket: felt like I wasn't going to do anything detrimental because if I was about to do something completely wrong someone was there to say, 'Whoa. …