| Student leadership is often reserved for the gifted and talented, high academic achievers, and popular and outgoing students. These roles are often associated with male students and not females. Various factors within our present day family structure render many school age children ill prepared for school success, much less school leadership. The middle school years tend to exacerbate social, emotional, and physical stresses in the lives of adolescent females within families. Limited emphasis is placed on leadership training; consequently, female adolescents may not view themselves as leaders. Middle schools often rely on older female adults and college mentors to provide tutoring, companionship, positive role models, and social skills development training. This study explored the impact of implementing a leadership skills training curriculum in a southeastern Virginia suburban middle school mentoring program for female adolescents. Female undergraduate and graduate students from a local university taught positive leadership qualities using an existing curriculum model- Building Everyday Leadership in All Teens: promoting Attitudes and Actions for Respect and Success(BEL)RTM (MacGregor, 2007). This study examined statistical differences between adolescent participants' scores on the Everyday Leadership Skills & Attitudes Inventory for tweens and teens(ELSA)RTM (MacGregor, 2010) to gain a better understanding of the students' perceptions of their qualities of leadership after completing a leadership skills training. Statistical procedures used to answer the research question included a one-way within-subjects repeated-measures analysis of variance (ANOVA), post hoc testing, and descriptive statistics. The research question sought to determine if there was a statistically significant difference in the mean ELSAQOL scores before, during, and after participating in the BEL curriculum. Results indicated there was a statistically significant difference between the mean scores before and after BEL and at the beginning and end of the BEL curriculum. |
