CONTEXTMentoring in research environments can serve as a tool for building resilience and supporting those belonging to groups marginalized by race, gender, international status, and firstgeneration status (Alvarez et al., 2016; Patton, 2009). Mentorship experiences of students and professors who are approachable, respectful, and available correspond to higher student self-efficacy and motivation (Komarraju et al., 2010), and mentoring undergraduates in research has similarly shown increased academic and motivational outcomes (Ahn, 2014). This paper examines mentoring practices within an engineering education lab group composed of students from multiple countries, ethnicities, and educational backgrounds. PURPOSE OR GOALUsing the collective mentoring experiences of members of our lab group, this paper examines the following questions: 1. What are the key mentoring values of this specific lab group? 2. How do these values impact our lab group's mentoring practices and the difficulties surrounding our lab group's mentoring practices? APPROACH We employ collaborative autoethnography, a form of autoethnography that involves "engaging in the study of self, collectively; it is a process and product of an ensemble performance, not a solo act" (Chang et al., 2012). In the discussion section this paper will specifically compare these findings with existing mentoring approaches as defined in Pfund et al. (2016). OUTCOMES Our lab group mentoring practices are characterized by three core values: collaboration, growth through exploration, and care and belongingness. Each of these values is defined and described within this specific diverse lab group. Collaboration for the lab group extended far beyond apprenticeship and was better characterized as a web of collaborative mentoring relationships characterized by growing each person's expertise and contribution while also allowing for the development of formal and informal mentoring experiences. Growth through exploration encourages and supports students to actively engage in new research practices. Care and belongingness provide the foundation that the rest of the mentoring experiences are built on, allowing students to feel safe enough to grow and contribute. Each of these values also created specific difficulties and challenges including availability constraints, time management, communication issues, and concern regarding ability to contribute. When comparing these values to Pfund et al. ( 2016), these mentoring values best reflect interpersonal and psychosocial mentoring practices. These practices encouraged the building of other research related and professional skills associated with other types of mentoring practices (Pfund et al., 2016). However, core values of the lab group were most connected with interpersonal and psychosocial mentoring practices. These findings agree with literature that psychosocial mentoring practices that build care and belongingness are particularly beneficial to marginalized students (Alvarez et al., 2016).

This paper examines an engineering dynamics course at Purdue University that was specifically designed to create an active, blended, and collaborative environment. In addition to in-person classes and support, students have access to blended content such as solution videos, mechanics visualizations, a course discussion forum, and interactive simulations. PURPOSE Many studies have shown that students' engagement in an online discussion forum enhances their learning performance (Davies & Graff, 2005;Hrastinski, 2008). However, our previous research showed that students' engagement in the online forum of our dynamics course differed significantly across students' demographics. We showed that women, white, or Asian American students were more likely to be involved in online discussions than men, international, or Hispanic students (Duan et al., 2018). In this paper, we take the previous analysis further by examining whether the observed differences in online student engagement mediate or moderate student performance. APPROACHTo answer our research question, we will first investigate the mediation effect by creating two models. A first model with race/international status as the mediating variable and gender identity as a control variable, and a second model with gender identity as the mediating variable and race/international status as a control. Second, we will investigate the moderation effect of demographic factors by creating a regression model including interaction terms to show the relationship of each demographic's discussion forum engagement to overall performance. The goal of investigating these interaction terms is to determine if a moderating relationship exists where demographic factors impact online engagement, which in turn impact course performance. CONCLUSIONS We find that gender identity is the only significant demographic factor that moderates the effect of a student's engagement on their performance. Based on the findings of our previous work, students of various racial and ethnic identities do engage differently in the discussion forum. However, this analysis was unable to detect any significant difference in student engagement based on demographics. Our paper contributes to understanding the mechanisms through which students' engagement can translate into academic performance by focusing on their demographic background. The moderating role of students' demographic background calls for a more targeted design of instructional tools in blended and collaborative environments to better support students from various demographic backgrounds.