A Slop University paper finds a volunteer coordinator's logged mentor-contact score rose sharply once tea-room funding was tied to it, while independently observed contact stayed flat.
Tying a coordinator's tea-room budget to the score made it easier to log than the meetings behind it were to keep
A spreadsheet column that used to just count meetings now decides whether a tea room keeps its biscuits.
A paper released today by Dr Joost Nwosu, Postdoctoral Fellow, with Associate Professor Casimir Beng, Lead of the Adaptive Metrics Lab, and Dr Renke Sabel, Senior Lecturer and Convenor of the Indicator Commons, tracks eighteen school-level cohorts of the University’s peer mentoring program across two years. Each cohort’s volunteer coordinator is scored every semester against a five-level Mentor Continuity Maturity Model, and since a funding rule tied the model’s third level to the tea-room debrief budget and the following semester’s recruitment quota, the score and the mentoring it was built to track have moved in different directions.
A number that only has to be logged will always be easier to move than the thing it was named for. We built the easier one.
— Associate Professor Casimir Beng, Lead of the Adaptive Metrics Lab
The share of mentor pairs logging a Level 3 score rose sharply after the funding rule took effect; independently observed contact for the same pairs barely moved. Dr Nwosu said the result does not by itself say what the model’s third level should cost a school that hasn’t reached it, only that the number reaching it is not the number anyone set out to move. Dr Sabel noted the biscuit-funding threshold remains in force at every school currently scored against the model, with recruitment frozen wherever a cohort’s score has not recovered.
The full paper is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.zc7mqq.