On July 27, 2009 the Northwest Regional Educational Laboratory convened a unique opportunity that brought researchers and practitioners together to inform and improve each other’s work. Approximately 100 people attended the one-day seminar to explore current research findings on school-based mentoring programs for students. The event was also an opportunity for the researchers to hear from mentoring program staff about the issues that were important to them.
Superintendent Jerry Colonna of Beaverton (OR) School District was elected to serve a second term as chair of the NWREL Board.

School-based mentoring builds on the familiar concepts of community-based mentoring--providing friendship, guidance, and targeted assistance to youth.

During the first session, Dr. Carla Herrera and Dr. Michael Karcher presented findings from their research on school-based mentoring programs. Dr. Herrera is conducting an impact study of Big Brothers Big Sisters school-based mentoring and Dr. Karcher is conducting a study of mentoring in learning environments.

The centerpiece of the event was a newly-released publication from the U.S. Department of Education’s Institute of Education Sciences (IES), Impact Evaluation of the U.S. Department of Education’s Student Mentoring Program. The chief investigator of the report, Dr. Lawrence Bernstein, gave a detailed explanation of the methodology of the evaluation. His presentation covered many different aspects of the study, including the evaluation questions, data collection procedures, strategies for recruiting sites, and data analysis decisions.

“The Student Mentoring Program study is perhaps the most comprehensive, rigorous evaluation of school-based mentoring to date,” says Michael Garringer, resource advisor for NWREL’s National Mentoring Center. “The findings were not as robust as many had hoped for, but it did shed a lot of light on how school-based mentoring efforts can structure themselves for success and the types of outcomes they should be aiming for.”

Three additional researchers shared initial findings of an ongoing meta-analysis of the three studies presented earlier in the day. Dr. David DuBois of University of Illinois-Chicago, Dr. Thomas Keller of Portland State University, and Mark Wheeler of Big Brothers Big Sisters of Alaska illustrated how, by looking at the results from multiple research projects, they were able to strengthen the findings about positive outcomes that resulted from the mentoring programs. This meta-analysis points to several common positive outcomes across evaluations, demonstrating that school-based mentoring is a strategy worthy of further investment by educators and funders.

After the presentations, the researchers led small discussion groups of the participants. The group members shared their questions about the studies and about conducting high-quality evaluations of their mentoring programs. Some of the topics that came up during the discussion included making analysis decisions, identifying outcomes, developing instruments, and the influence of politics in shaping evaluations. The groups also shared their ideas about what the current research has failed to capture, including how to measure the success of programs beyond academic achievement.

Says Garringer, “This kind of practitioner-researcher interaction is extremely valuable for an emerging field such as school-based mentoring. The practitioners learn how to interpret and use rigorous research, and the researchers get to see how their work influences on-the-ground services to youth. Neither group can improve the quality of mentoring without this type of dialogue taking place.”

A copy of the IES evaluation report is available at http://ies.ed.gov/ncee/pubs/20094047/. A video of Dr. Bernstein’s presentation and additional materials from the event will be available on the Northwest Lab Web site in the coming weeks.