Contents
Presenters
Hafsa Tahir – Student Development Officer, Careers and Employability
Liam Power – Senior Student Development Officer, Careers and Employability
Paper
The Course Buddies scheme supports first-year undergraduates through peer mentoring on academic and personal aspects of university life. Recently, we implemented the self-determination theory to boost engagement, highlighting its potential value across various initiatives. The program is an impactful extracurricular providing valuable learning support.
The Course Buddies scheme (formerly CityBuddies) is a long-running peer mentoring initiative at City St George’s, aimed at supporting first-year undergraduate students as they transition into university. First-year students are matched with trained volunteer mentors in their 2nd or 3rd year studying the same course. Mentors provide guidance on both academic and non-academic aspects of university life, making the scheme a valuable extracurricular opportunity that supports learning and student wellbeing.
Recruiting volunteers is a known challenge (Evans et al., 2024), this is confounded when recruiting volunteer mentors, particularly as mentoring requires an element of pre-screening, and is a longer commitment compared to other forms of mentoring (DuBois et al., 2005). Despite this, the scheme has consistently recruited a sufficient number of mentors. In 2024/25, the Course Buddy scheme had 182 trained mentors, meaning 728 students were able to access a Course Buddy. There are several contributors to the scheme’s success, more recently, we have found that leveraging and encouraging concepts from the Self-Determination theory (SDT) (Deci and Ryan, 2015, pp. 486–491) to be effective in mentor recruitment.
Self-Determination Theory distinguishes between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation (Ryan & Deci, 2020, p. 101860). Intrinsic motivation arises from an internal desire to learn and is further categorized into the drive to know, to accomplish, and to experience stimulation. In contrast, extrinsic motivation is driven by external factors and is subdivided into identified regulation, introjected regulation, and external regulation (Ryan & Deci, 2020, p. 101860).
By embedding SDT principles into promotional messaging, social media, training materials, and face-to-face engagement, we cultivated an environment that resonated with students’ varied drives to participate, resulting in 125 mentors being recruited in a 3-month period.
We believe that applications of SDT can be applied to initiatives beyond peer mentoring, particularly in initiatives that require engagement and commitment.
Attendees will:
- Receive an overview of the Self Determination Theory.
- Get an insight into peer mentoring schemes at City St George’s.
- Explore ways of implementing the Self-Determination Theory into existing initiatives.
- Explore using the Self-Determination theory when creative initiatives.
References
Deci, E.L. and Ryan, R.M. (2015) ‘Self-Determination Theory’, in Wright, J.D. (ed.) International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences (Second Edition) Oxford: Elsevier, pp. 486–491.
DuBois, D.L., Karcher, M.J., Stukas, A.A. and Tanti, C. (2005) ‘Recruiting and Sustaining Volunteer Mentors’Handbook of Youth Mentoring.
Evans, B., Cook, J., Jochum, V., King, D., Kitson, B. and Williams, G. (2024) Present Struggles, Past Origins: Current Challenges in Volunteering Amidst Two Decades of Decline An analysis of the VCSE Barometer Survey by the VCSE Data and Insights National Observatory.
