Mind the Gap: Mentoring, Goal-setting and Self-Evaluation for International Graduate Students

Breakout Room D

The objective of this paper is to understand how peer mentoring and exercises to encourage goal-setting and self-evaluation can support first year international graduate students to engage in Canadian universities’ online learning environment during COVID-19. Surveys, students’ work, and instructors’ reflections were used to inform the current study. Preliinary findings show that during COVID-19, online peer mentoring and exercises to encourage goal-setting and self-evaluation have been able to support international students’ behavioural, cognitive and emotional engagement in Canadian academic learning to a certain degree. The findings also show that there is a need to use real-time communication tools to enhance the e-peer mentoring process for international students in an online course environment. Although the personal goal-setting exercises were new experiences for many of the international students, they proved to be valuable steps in their adaptation to Canadian graduate studies.