On a New Stage: The Effectiveness of School-Based Mentoring Programs for Students Transitioning to the Next Level of School

Abstract

In recent years, due to its greater flexibility and focus on academics, school-based mentoring has become a popular alternative to community-based mentoring, where mentors meet their mentees outside of school and engage in more social activities. Past studies have found that school-based mentoring helps students improve academic performance, academic confidence, relationships, and behavior. One area of school-based mentoring that has not been adequately explored is the effect it has on students transitioning into a new level of school. Transitions have been shown to be very disruptive on youths’ academic performance and behavior. Our paper suggests that school-based mentoring is more effective for students in a transition year than for students who are not in a transition year. We hypothesize that youths who were transitioning to a new level of school would show greater benefits from school-based mentoring than mentored youths who were not in a transition year. We further hypothesize that school-based mentoring would be more effective on students transitioning into high school than those transitioning into middle school. We find that when students are separated into those undergoing a transition into high school and those transitioning into middle school, mentored students in a high school transition show a greater improvement than students receiving mentoring who are not in a transition year. We further find that school-based mentoring impacts students in a middle school transition year very little and, in fact, may be a negative influence on students.