The Role of Islamic Mentoring in Developing the Research Competencies of Graduate Students in the Field of Knowledge and Information Science

Considering the important role of Information Sciences and Knowledge Studies agents in scrutinizing and evaluating the quality and quantity of science development at various institutional and individual levels, one of the competencies required for them is research competencies. Thus the purpose of the present study is to investigate the role of Islamic mentoring in developing the research competencies of graduate students of Knowledge and Information Science.

This study is a descriptive-survey study in terms of the data collection method and a correlational study in terms of the data analysis method. The research data was collected from the graduate students of Tehran universities. Then, 102 cases were selected as the research sample using the stratified random sampling method. To measure the students' research competencies, the subscales of "performing & managing research" and "interpreting & transferring knowledge of student" in the = questionnaire of development of students were used, and to collect the data related to mentoring, the Islamic mentoring questionnaire (Khaghahanizadeh, Taqavi & Ebadi, 2019) was used.

According to the results, the mean of Islamic mentoring and student’s research competencies are 3.78 and 3.84, which is indicative of the favorable situation of the students. Results of the correlation analysis indicate that the correlation coefficients of all factors of Islamic mentoring with research competency except "challenging", "counseling" and "networking", were significant and positive. The Regression analysis results are indicative of significance of research model and show that a considerable amount of variance of research competencies is explained by mentoring.

Originality/value:

 The present study investigated the status of future KIS professionals and its predictability based on one of the educational strategies compatible with the prevailing cultural conditions.