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Overview

This review examines how youth mentoring influences school attendance, academic performance, and educational attainment (APEA) outcomes. In general, empirical studies reveal that mentoring programs tend to have “small-to-moderate” impact on mentees’ academic outcomes. Importantly, small-to-moderate effects should not necessarily be interpreted as “not meaningful”. Although individual mentors may produce small, positive changes on APEA outcomes, these small effects can have a large cumulative effect. Because mentoring services are among the most frequently provided prevention program offered in the United States[i], small positive effects of mentoring program can equate to large, population changes on APEA outcomes. At the same time, some mentoring programs have integrated specific activities to increase the effects mentors have on APEA outcomes for individual youth participating in their programs.

What mentoring activities account for variability in APEA outcomes? One of the primary factors that influences mentors’ impact on APEA outcomes is the type of activities in which mentors engage. Others have differentiated between two broad types of activities, 1) those focused primarily on enhancing relationship closeness between the mentor and mentee and 2) those focused primarily on helping the mentee develop a skill or achieve a goal.[ii]^,[iii] Instrumental mentoring programs — those that target specific school-related skills (e.g., organization, coping with stress) for improving specific outcomes (e.g., improved grades, high school graduation) — tend to have a larger than average impact on mentees’ academic performance. Instrumental mentoring programs are typically characterized by structured or semi-structured curriculum, training for mentors that focus on skills building in mentees, and ongoing or as-needed supervision for mentors. It is important to note that the emphasis of instrumental programs on skill building does not mean that the emotional quality of the relationship is unimportant. Indeed, mentoring programs generally show larger than average effects when mentors and mentees report having high quality mentoring relationships (e.g., those characterized by mutuality, trust, longer duration).

It appears that both types of mentoring activity described above are important contributors to promoting APEA outcomes, although the relative emphasis of each type of activity varies across programs. As an alternative to the instrumental programmatic approach, for example, high quality mentoring relationships may also facilitate mentors’ ability to set goals and teach specific skills (i.e., those activities common to instrumental mentoring programs). This mentoring focused on relationship development, sometimes referred to as a developmental model of mentoring, builds on the assumption that mentors can adapt to the needs of mentees as they go through different phases of development and face different challenges. Likewise, some evidence suggests that designing and implementing activities to explicitly address the cultural and socio-political needs of mentees from minoritized backgrounds may result in the formation of stronger mentoring relationships and lead to greater impact on APEA outcomes. We also find that school-based mentoring services – programs offered to youth in school settings – are popular ways for mentoring programs to target APEA outcomes (particularly for students experiencing elevated risk due to observed academic or behavioral difficulties), but that implementing school-based mentoring programs with sufficient fidelity and dosage can be challenging.

How do these mentoring activities produce positive impact on APEA outcomes? From the research reviewed, we know less about the intervening processes that link mentoring to academic outcomes. It appears that mentoring supports improvement in mentees’ academic performance by building mentees’ internal and external skills and resources. Internal skills and resources include coping skills, help-seeking, growth mindset, and self-efficacy. External skills and resources include stronger connections with schools, parents, and teachers.

Introduction

Promoting academic success is among the most frequent outcomes targeted by youth mentoring services. Academic outcomes, in this review, refer to measures of youth learning (e.g., grades, standardized test scores) as well as regular attendance and, ultimately, graduation from high school. Formal mentors (i.e., non-familial adult volunteers matched with youth) as well as natural mentors (e.g., teachers, fictive kin, coaches, or other adults) are often considered to be important resources for supporting success in school. Given the importance of academic outcomes, and prevalence of mentoring, what does research on mentoring and academic outcomes tell us about the impact of mentoring on these outcomes? This review was conducted to answer the following four questions:

1. What are the effects of mentoring on school attendance, academic performance, and educational attainment (APEA) among youth?
2. What factors condition or shape the effects of mentoring on APEA?
3. What intervening processes are most important for linking mentoring to beneficial effects on APEA?
4. To what extent have efforts to provide mentoring to youth with APEA as a priority outcome reached and engaged the intended youth, been implemented with high quality, and been adopted and sustained by host organizations and settings?

For this review, we defined APEAs in the following ways. School attendance refers to how often students attended K-12. For example, attendance is often measured in terms of number of days absent from school (e.g., absenteeism or truancy), or the amount of instructional time a student receives. (e.g., instructional time). Academic performance refers to quantitative measures of learning. Measures may be summarized through letter grades, grade point averages (self-reported or administrative records summarizing grades across courses), as well as standardized measures of learning (e.g., standardized state test scores, college entrance examinations etc.) Educational attainment refers to the successful completion of an educational degree program (e.g., high school diploma), demonstrated progress toward high school graduation (e.g., credits earned), or demonstrated progress toward completing a post-secondary degree (e.g., credits earned, enrollment in a post-secondary degree program). Educational attainment also refers to the failure to successfully complete a degree program (e.g., early school dropout). Finally, Mentoring refers to “relationships and activities that take place between youth (i.e., mentees) and older or more experienced persons (i.e., mentors) who are acting in a nonprofessional helping capacity, whether through a program or more informally, to provide support that benefits one or more areas of the young person’s development” (see Mentoring Defined).

References

*Study cited in the research sections of the review.

[i] Garringer, M., McQuillin, S., & McDaniel, H. (2017). Examining Youth Mentoring Services across America: Findings from the 2016 National Mentoring Program Survey. MENTOR: National Mentoring Partnership.

[ii] Hamilton, S. F., & Hamilton, M.A. (1990). Linking Up project report. Unpublished manuscript, Cornell University.

[iii] *Karcher, M. J., Kuperminc, G. P., Portwood, S. G., Sipe, C. L., & Taylor, A. S. (2006). Mentoring programs: A framework to inform program development, research, and evaluation.  Journal of Community Psychology, 34(6), 709-725. https://doi.org/10.1002/jcop.20215

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