A review of the evaluation processes for mentoring at-risk students in the middle school

During the past two decades, mentoring has seen wide acceptance as an intervention strategy for at-risk youth. Experiences with private sector programs such as Big Brothers/Big Sisters of America have paved the way for the incorporation of mentoring into public youth support programs. For disadvantaged middle school children, the mentoring relationship promises a source of adult caring and guidance and can stem the tide of drop-out. However, the success of public-school mentoring programs has been mixed. Initial results have raised significant questions. What differentiates between effective mentoring relationships and ineffective ones? What differentiates between successful mentoring programs and unsuccessful ones?; The mentoring phenomenon is a fairly unstudied field, and there are few models for measuring impacts. Further there have been too few studies of best practices from which to build models for program success. Often, program managers chose to allocate the greatest possible resources to program activities and support services, leaving insufficient budget for program evaluations. Program evaluations are required to provide both quality control and satisfy accountability concerns.; This study explores evaluation processes for middle school mentoring programs serving at-risk students. Its purpose is to provide practitioners, program managers and stakeholders, a framework with which to design the evaluation of mentoring programs. Program managers need information to monitor program quality and control program direction. Stakeholders seek accountability information to justify program inception and continuation. To that end, this study reviews existing mentoring literature for evaluation structure. No effort will be made to validate the efficacy of mentoring as an intervention for at-risk youth. Instead, this study first reviews what constitutes good practice in education program evaluation, and then captures current practices in mentoring program evaluation. It concludes with lessons learned from program evaluations and a model for evaluating mentoring programs that serve at-risk students in the middle school.; A number of best practices and lessons learned were discovered. First, evaluation planning must be integrated with program planning. Secondly, in light of resource constraints, evaluations should be limited to critical points in the mentoring program and focused on those issues that will significantly impact the success of the mentoring relationship or the program itself. These critical points are during the process of screening and matching protegee and mentors; during the mentoring relationships; and at the end of the mentoring interventions. Lastly, with respect to evaluating the impacts to the mentored youth, evaluations should focus on a limited set of key academic and behavior indicators, to economize resources and to be unobtrusive so as not to adversely impact the mentoring relationship.