OPINIONS OF NURSING STUDENTS ON UNIVERSITY MENTORING

In Higher Education, academic mentoring with students is considered as an important axis in conclusion of studies. The process of change in Spanish universities is in line with the European Higher Education Area and with ECTS credits. In this sense, it is required monitoring the student's learning process, in which mentoring is considered as a strategy for improvement; and the role of the professor-tutor is essential for orientation, retention and academic success of the students. The aim of this study is to analyze the opinions of nursing students on different aspects of academic mentoring. A descriptive and correlational research was conducted, in which took part different teaching centers of University of Southern Spain. 1,015 nursing students were interviewed. A questionnaire was designed and validated through a panel of experts. The sociodemographic variables were: age, gender, teaching center and academic year. The variables on aspects of the tutorials were: planning, inclusion of mentoring in the syllabus, fidelity, compliance with time, compulsory nature, type of assistance, evaluation and grading. SPSS version 21.0 was used to data analysis. The results show influences of gender, academic year and kind of center on the opinions about mentoring (p < 0.05). In this sense, it is needed to homogenize criteria and records used in the mentoring. In addition, professors and university managers should be encouraged to use of mentoring and to establish measures of monitoring it.