Measuring Faculty Mentoring Competency: Establishing the Validity of a Short Form

This paper describes the procedures for evaluating the psychometric properties of the 26-item Mentoring Competency Assessment (MCA) scale and developing short-forms to measure faculty mentoring outcomes for the NIH-funded Building Infrastructure Leading to Diversity (BUILD) Initiative and National Research Mentoring Network (NRMN). Analyses were conducted using responses to the MCA scale from NRMN mentors and faculty across 11 BUILD institutions in the 2017-18 academic year. After performing extensive item factor analyses and taking the MCA sub-constructs into analytical consideration, we created an 8-item short form and a 14-item short form. Analyses indicate that both short forms nearly equivalently measure faculty mentoring competency and are more feasible to implement in future studies, compared to the original, longer scale.