Symposium Proceedings »
S4.8.5 The Role of Mentoring for Talent Development and Excellence
Implications of talent-development mentoring will be considered for different domains and developmental stages. Symposium Author 3 focuses on using specialized guidance and education to help gifted girls become patented inventors in STEM by considering the profile of adolescent girls with potential to be STEM inventors, hands-on STEM-lab invention opportunities, and the role of mentoring. Symposium Author 1 and colleagues report longitudinal studies of online mentoring for talented girls in STEM---based on log-file, network-analysis, questionnaire, and interview data---showing better mentoring outcomes for mentees who received a combination of one-on-one mentoring from female STEM professionals and group mentoring. Symposium Author 2 discusses how mentors transform talented youth into creative producers by examining insider knowledge (i.e., access to networks of information as well as attitudes and behaviors rewarded by gatekeepers) and psychosocial skills during advanced stages of talent development. Symposium Author 4 highlights the factors related to desiring or detesting mentoring, drawing on theory from identity development and three empirical mixed-methods studies of academically talented merit-scholarship students, elite scientists, and doctoral students. About 20–25% of these samples do not value or desire mentoring. Implications for the practice of mentoring will be discussed in light of the four presentations.