MENTORING SUPPORT IN DOCTORAL STUDIES: STRATEGIES FOR THE EFFECTIVENESS OF MENTORING RELATIONSHIP

Providing student support in different areas of academic life has become one of the most important prerequisites for meeting internal quality standards nowadays and an integral part of higher education mentoring practice and theory (ESG, 2015). Mentors have a pivotal role in providing supportive working climate for student mentees and allowing them to develop and advance, yet, only the capable ones reach the objectives of the support. A lot of research has been done on the effectiveness of mentor - mentee relationship and desirable mentoring behaviors. However, findings indicate that the theoretical corpus lacks consensus on a unique mentoring framework consisting of strategies that can be applicable in any higher education context with the aim of achieving the efficiency in a mentor-student relationship, irrespective of geographical, cultural and economic differences. Based on the content analysis applied on recent studies about successful mentoring practice, this paper presents four mentoring contexts and, in relation to them, it outlines useful mentoring strategies recognized and prioritized by mentors and mentees from different university settings while at the same time considering the extent to which they purposefully fulfill the learning needs of students. The paper thus serves as a resource for some future research which may be directed towards developing a valuable mentoring model with a unique set of strategies and guidelines on how the strategies may be adopted and applied by mentors depending on a situation. Finally, the paper serves as a model for mentors' evaluation and self-evaluation processes as crucial measures for achieving and maintaining quality.