A Structured Advising and Mentorship Framework for Academic Recovery: Conceptualizing the Pathways from Probation to Persistence in Undergraduate STEM Students

Lydia Githinji; Fadeke Atobatele

doi:10.56201/ijssmr.vol.11no12.2025.pg700.720

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A Structured Advising and Mentorship Framework for Academic Recovery: Conceptualizing the Pathways from Probation to Persistence in Undergraduate STEM Students

Lydia Githinji, Fadeke Atobatele

Abstract

Academic probation is a decisive juncture in the undergraduate trajectory, and the stakes are heightened in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics fields, where rigorous gateway courses, competitive grading, and high cognitive demand place many capable students at early risk of departure. Probation, however, is not solely a marker of deficiency; it can function as a structured opportunity for intervention when institutions respond with coordinated support rather than punitive monitoring. This paper develops a conceptual framework explaining how structured advising and mentorship can redirect undergraduate students in these fields from probationary status toward sustained persistence. Integrating interactionalist theories of departure, psychological models of retention, transition theory, and motivational and social cognitive perspectives with recent empirical evidence on advising, mentorship, belonging, self-regulated learning, and mindset, the framework specifies a sequence linking antecedent conditions, a coordinated advising and mentorship intervention, five mediating psychological mechanisms, proximal academic outcomes, and the distal outcome of persistence. The mediating mechanisms are academic self-efficacy, sense of belonging, self-regulated learning and metacognition, adaptive attribution, and academic and social integration. The framework identifies moderators that shape intervention strength, namely mentor match quality, dosage and timing, student readiness, and cultural responsiveness, and it articulates a reciprocal feedback process through which early recovery experiences reinforce the mechanisms that produced them. Ten testable propositions are advanced, each with a supporting rationale, and the paper offers an illustrative application, guidance on measurement and research design, a comparison with alternative approaches, and implications for practice, policy, and research. The framework reframes academic recovery as a designed, mechanism driven process rather than an individual student burden.

Keywords

academic probation; academic recovery; persistence; undergraduate STEM education; academic advising; mentorship; self-efficacy; sense of belonging Online only

References

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A Structured Advising and Mentorship Framework for Academic Recovery: Conceptualizing the Pathways from Probation to Persistence in Undergraduate STEM Students

Abstract

Keywords

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