Richard Pierce

Analysis of On-line Communication in a Mentoring Project: Analysis of Online Communication Richard Pierce

Telementoring potentially extends opportunities to many more students and will allow mentors to participate, who otherwise would find the time investment prohibitive (Muller, 1997). The integration of telecommunication opportunities has removed many of the obstacles, such as time and space, which have doomed mentoring relationships that did not employ telecommunications technology (Noe, 1988). Understanding the nature of communication between participants involved in telementoring programs requires the systematic study of said communication. This research focused upon the nature of on-line communications in a curriculum-based project that involved secondary students who electronic mail to mentor middle school students. On-line communications included character count, word count, and sentence count of electronic mail correspondence. One purpose of this study was to determine whether there are significant differences in the on-line communications of middle school students with regard to gender and grade level. Another purpose of this study was to determine if significant differences existed between middle school and secondary school participants.