Fostering Leadership Skills for Life After High School: A Study of a Regional Academic Honors High School Program and Its Effects on Leadership Skills in College and Caree

This descriptive quantitative study with a cross-sectional survey design explores the leadership experiences incorporated within a regional academic honors high school program to include small group collaboration, senior internship, mentoring relationship, community service, and reflection journals. The researcher examined the relationship between these high school leadership experiences and leadership in college and careers after the students graduate. The graduating cohorts of 2012--2016 from seven high schools in the regional program were surveyed regarding their self-perceptions on the impact of high school leadership experiences on both college and career and the graduates' current leadership involvement. The researcher also incorporated Socially Responsible Leadership Scales, 2nd edition, which measured participants' self-perceived development of socially responsible leadership attributes based on six of the eight constructs of the social change model. Constructs such as consciousness of self, commitment, collaboration, common purpose, citizenship, and change directly align with the program's mission; previous research also has indicated that true transformational leadership is concerned with the collective good. This study sought to contribute to leadership development research by exploring how leadership experiences beyond academic rigor, college preparatory skills, and 21st-century skills impact students. The study findings indicate that there is possibly a significant relationship between participants' self-perceptions of the impact of high school leadership experiences on college and career and participants' self-perceived development of socially responsible leadership attributes. A significant relationship between participants' self-perceived development of socially responsible leadership attributes and current leadership involvement, as well as between participants' self-perceptions of the impact of high school leadership experiences on college and career and current leadership involvement, was not evident to a significant degree, but the findings suggest that high school leadership experiences had a stronger impact on leadership in college than leadership in career.