Showing posts with label knowing the research. Show all posts
Showing posts with label knowing the research. Show all posts

Wednesday, December 10, 2008

Tutoring/Mentoring at-risk youth IS a public health issue!!!!

The Tutor/Mentor Hospital Connection ( T/MHC)
So, fresh off the heels of Novartis Pharmaceutical rep John Knight's volunteer spotlight article I thought it would be a good time to discuss the expanded role that health care providers such as hospitals and community clinics can play in supporting youth tutoring/mentoring. When discussing this issue my boss Dan Bassill loves to quote an article published last year by the Centers for Disease Control that opens:
"If medical researchers were to discover an elixir that could increase life expectancy, reduce the burden of illness, delay the consequences of aging, decrease risky health behavior, and shrink disparities in health, we would celebrate such a remarkable discovery. Robust epidemiological evidence suggests that education is such an elixir. Yet, health professionals rarely identified improving school graduation rates as a major public health objective, nor have they systematically examined their role in achieving this objective." The full text can be found here.
When seen from this perspective, it is remarkable that hospitals and other health care providers are not doing more to help support youth tutoring/mentoring programs , particularly because there are countless health care facilities located in and around high poverty neighborhoods that could be making a big difference in the lives of local youth. Not only that, but since we all know about the high demand for health care workers, even in today's economy, it's a wonder that more health care facilities haven't gotten involved in supporting youth tutoring/mentoring programs from a workforce development perspective. That is, by supporting youth development through tutoring/mentoring programming, hospitals can nurture an up and coming workforce to fill the diverse and critical staff positions in todays health care providers, while at the same time, making a positive impact in their local community.

A recent research study by the Lewin Group concluded that: "It is clear that sponsoring youth mentoring is beneficial to hospitals". So, if supporting youth mentoring helps hospitals achieve necessary goals, such as: workforce development, positive publicity in the community and chances to expose impressionable youth to the benefits of preventative medicine and healthy living habits which lowers costly emergency room visits down the road, why aren't more hospitals involved in supporting these types of programs? We here at the Tutor/Mentor Connection are trying to change that through our Tutor/Mentor Hospital Connection initiative.

We see hospitals as potential partners with a vested interest in the health and well-being of their communities. They can play a fundamental role in creating spaces for youth mentoring programs as well as drawing resources to these and other pre-existing programs in their neighborhoods. For example, hospitals can use their large educated staffs to lead mobilizations that recruit workplace volunteers, provide healthcare support, and raise operating dollars for dozens of tutor/mentor programs near the hospital! Teaching hospitals can engage alumni and students as volunteers or as researchers to determine what strategies work best. They can also encourage leaders in public health to get behind efforts to get at-risk youth into college and their hospitals as nurses and doctors rather than as gang-related gunshot victims.

To get this initiative off the ground all we need are a few people who are passionate for change and willing to use their networks and talents to improve the futures of countless Chicago-area youth growing up in poverty. Please email me at chris.warrens.mail (at) gmail.com or call me at 312-492-9614 if you or someone you know would be interested in helping us out with this...and please see the aforementioned Tutor/Mentor Hospital Connection powerpoint for more info.

Monday, November 3, 2008

Bridging Social Capital

Last week my boss Dan Bassill, Founder and CEO of Cabrini Connections, blogged about "bridging social capital" and how providing a means by which kids growing up in high-poverty neighborhoods can gain access to new social networks is perhaps the most important resource we can provide to our youth. You can find his post here. Indeed, at Cabrini Connections, what we do is to bring together successful working professionals with kids in economically disadvantaged communities and offer a structure for them to develop deep and lasting relationships, opening up the mentors networks, (personal, workplace, faith-based, community...etc) to their mentee (student) so that the youth can benefit from these contacts when seeking employment, internship experience, college admission and a career.

Harvard Political Scientist Robert Putnam has defined social capital as: "the collective value of all 'social networks' and the inclinations that arise from these networks to do things for each other". Considering the dearth of economic resources in isolated, high-poverty neighborhoods such as Cabrini Green, it can be argued that kids in our target population have less developed and supportive social networks than their counterparts in more affluent areas of Lincoln Park or the Gold Coast and that this contributes to their increased risk for negative outcomes such as: dropping out of high school, entering the prison system and teen pregnancy. In fact, a landmark study looking at over 24,000 public, Catholic and other private school students found that social capital in students' families and communities attributed to the much lower dropout rates in Catholic schools compared with the higher dropout rates found in public schools (Coleman and Hoffer 1987).

In a recent book, Bowling Alone (2000) Putnam posits that "Child development is powerfully shaped by social capital" and continued "presence of social capital has been linked to various positive outcomes, particularly in education". He argues that positive youth outcomes are primarily a result of a parent's social capital in their community. This crucially includes the relationships that they have with their childs' teachers and educators and more generally the strength of their relations with other individuals who determine their childs development both at school and in the community. However, in high-poverty communities where single mother-led households are the norm and numerous factors converge to requre these lone parents to work multiple jobs, leading to less time spent with children and their educators, it is difficult to accrue the high levels of social capital, that help catalyze a child's success.

This is where tutor/mentor programs like Cabrini Connections step in and help "bridge" this social capital. For instance, in our program mentors like last weeks' volunteer spotlight Carolyn Grunst work with both their students and their educators, meeting with school counselors, teachers and administrators to ensure that the child is receiving the resources they need at school while also developing trusting relationships with the child's primary caregivers. Mentors thus serve as bridges between often disparate communities, between school and home life, between student life and the professional world and between Cabrini-Green and the mahogany trimmed offices of elite law firms around the city. In this way, mentors help to develop networks of support (i.e. social capital) around the youth that increase their opportunities for success, ensuring they stay on the right track through junior high and high schools, continue with higher education and enter a career by the age of 25.

Monday, October 6, 2008

Good article about racism in the NY Times today

Hey everyone, I just wanted to direct you all to a great little piece by Nicholas Kristof that's in today's New York Times. It addresses some of the same issues surrounding racism that I discussed in my recent post in relation to the election. It cites a few more interesting papers that deal with racism in the hiring process for black applicants. The crux of his argument is that, in general, we have implicit racial biases that affect our behavior and cognition even though we may not be aware of their existence. Psychologists have termed the unconscious racial discrimination that occurs as a result of these biases "aversive racism" and research has shown that this type of racism has not declined significantly over time, despite the fact that conscious prejudice (or outright admitted racism) has in fact declined significantly. In other words, evidence shows that people still maintain unconscious racist beliefs yet do believe that they are racist... a phenomenon that Kristof dubs "Racism Without Racists".

If the earlier link doesn't work, the article can be found here:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/05/opinion/05kristof.html?em

Wednesday, October 1, 2008

Knowing the Research: Racism in the Job Market

Hello everyone! So we are in our third week of tutoring here at Cabrini Connections this week and everything is running very smoothly! Our clubs are going well, we're getting a lot of student interest in our new college-prep curriculum and dozens of kids have signed up for our 5 scheduled college visits. Since our program is running so well, I thought I'd indulge and write a post about some recent research I read about discrimination in the job market. Since it's difficult enough to get a decent job these days, it's important to realize the unique disadvantages that African-American applicants face, particularly low-income applicants such as our students who already suffer a lack of resources and flexibility afforded to other job-seekers.

In the last 15 years or so, much research has tried to investigate the types of discrimination that job applicants of color face (particularly Blacks and Latinos). Arguments have been made claiming that the real reason why applicants of color are not offered jobs at a rate consistent with white applicants is the difference in skill and experience between the candidates (Farkas and Vicknair 1996; Neal and Johnson 1996). These studies also argue that racial inequality in wages is largely explained by differences in cognitive skill. However, a recent study by Pager, Western and Bonikowski of Princeton University demonstrated that in fact there is a significant racial preference for white candidates among hundreds of New York City employers when confronted with otherwise identical White, Latino and Black applicants.

In this study, Black, Latino and White men were recruited and then matched on age, height, verbal skills, interactional styles and physical attractiveness, were trained together and given fictitious resumes indicating identical educational accomplishment, work experience and neighborhood of residence. These so-called "testers" then presented themselves at a series of randomly selected job interviews as high school graduates with consistent work experience in entry-level jobs in order to see which applicants were more likely to be called-back for another interview and/or hired. Great care was made to ensure that every possible difference was controlled between the applicants in each set.

After the each matched set of Black, Latino and White applicants interviewed individually at 171 NYC employers, their call-backs were tallied up. Remarkably, the White applicant in each group received callbacks 31% of the time, more than the 25% callback rate of the Latino applicants and significantly more than the 15% callback rate of the Black applicants. Remember, these applicants were matched so that they were identical in every way, except their race... yet Black applicants were half as likely to get a job offer than White applicants! This suggests that a Black applicant would have to look twice as long for a job than an equally qualified White applicant!

Even more shocking than this was the second part of the experiment, where matched Black and Latino applicants applied for the same set of jobs as an equally qualified White applicant... except the White applicants were instructed to reveal that they had just been released from an 18 month prison stay for a drug felony (cocaine possession with intent to distribute). Amazingly, these white applicants with a criminal record got callbacks from 17% of the 171 employers, compared to 13% of employers for otherwise identical Black applicants with no criminal record!!

The results of this study, which are consistent with earlier work ( summarized in Heckman and Siegelman 1993) show that we are most certainly not yet living in what some social commentators are calling a "postracial" society. Clearly race continues to play a large role in the hiring practices of many employers, which puts qualified African-American applicants at a significant disadvantage compared to Whites and even Latinos. For this reason, we here at Cabrini Connections are committed to offering our students, who are overwhelmingly African-American, the resources they need to help surmount the additional challenges that Black youth face growing up in poverty. By getting these youth involved in one-on-one relationships with a dedicated mentor, it is our hope that our youth can benefit from access to their mentors' networks, which will give them a leg up in the quest for employment, college admission and future success in their chosen careers. We hope that these mentors can connect their mentees with jobs and pull them towards careers that they might otherwise be impeded from seeking.



It is a sad fact that we still have to deal with racism in today's society. However, rather than sweep it under the rug and ignore it's consequences, allowing it to fester and grow, studies like this one confront its effects head on, forcing us to address it's existence and actively combat it, knowing that, to quote Malcolm X, "all human beings are respected as such, regardless of their color".


References



Farkas, George. and K. Vicknair. 1996. “Appropriate Tests of Racial Wage
Discrimination Require Controls for Cognitive Skill: omment on Cancio, Evans,
and Maume.” American Sociological Review 61:557-60.

Heckman, James and Peter Siegelman. 1993. “The Urban Institute Audit Studies: Their Methods and Findings.” Pp. 187-258 in Clear and Convincing Evidence: Measurement of Discrimination in America, edited by Michael Fix and Raymond Struyk. Lanham, MD: University Press of America.

Neal, Derek, and William Johnson. 1996. “The Role of Premarket Factors in Black-White
Wage Differences.” Journal of Political Economy 104:869-895.

Pagar, D., Western, B., Bonikowski, B. (2006) Race at Work: Realities of Race and Criminal Record in the New York City Job Market. Report prepared for the 50th Anniversary of the New York City Commission on Human Rights.

Wednesday, August 27, 2008

Knowing the Research: Challenges in Educational Research

Building off of my last post, which discussed some possible ideas for new tutoring/mentoring research, I just wanted to discuss one important aspect of this mentoring research that I have yet to address. It is a methodological issue common to all disciplines utilizing experimental studies, but it is particularly important in education research. It is the issue of random assignment.

For those who aren't so scientifically inclined, one basic tenet of an experimental study is the inclusion of a control group, or a group of people who don't receive whatever the independent variable being tested is (in this case, enrollment in a tutor/mentor program), but are measured nonetheless to ensure that whatever gains observed in the other group (the experimental group) are the result of the particular intervention (or independent variable) and not some other factor. For example, if a group of students' math abilities are measured immediately before enrolling here at Cabrini Connections and then again after spending one year with the program, it is likely that they will show improvement. However, that doesn't necessarily mean that they improved BECAUSE they enrolled in our program, just that they improved WHILE they were enrolled in our program. The improvement might well have been caused by the students math curriculum in the schools, playing a computer game or even playing dice. We simply don't know if we only measure one group. However, in a controlled experiment we would have 2 groups of kids, one group that enrolls in Cabrini Connections for a year and another who remains uninvolved in any tutor/mentor program. Then, both groups are tested before and after spending a year in the program. Now, we can reliably compare the 2 groups, provided that they come from the same population of kids growing up in Cabrini Green and are more or less matched on variables like socioeconomic status, age, sex...etc, and see if the kids enrolled in the tutor/mentor program showed SIGNIFICANTLY MORE improvement in their math scores than others BECAUSE they were enrolled in Cabrini Connections.

This issue is a constant problem in educational research and studies like the aforementioned ones becuase of the difficulty in what is known as random assignment of participants. This is to say that, because most of the time the researchers running the studies cannot get a group of participants from one population and randomly select half of them to enroll in a given tutor/mentor program and the other half to continue living their lives exactly the same way as before. When researchers can actually do this, their experiments are called "Randomized Field Trials" or RFTs. Use of RFTs is increasing in educational research and is a hotly debated topic, as they often require more time and money to carry out. However, as I mentioned earlier, they do allow the researchers to draw conclusions about the effectiveness of a particular intervention in terms of causal relationships (i.e. enrolling at cabrini connections caused my math scores to improve). This is very important because it is not of much value to tutor/mentor program adminstrators, educators or concerned parents to draw the conclusion that children who participated in one particular type of program improved in certain areas, but that improvement could very well be due to other factors having nothing to do with their involvement with a tutor/mentor program. Using RFTs allow us to make concrete and useful conclusions, backed by scientific evidence.

Unfortunately, much of the research addressing the effectiveness of tutor/mentor programs does not utilize Randomized Field Trials, and thus fails to really tell us much of anything that can be of significant benefit in determining the best practices that should be used for our program. Therefore, I am of the opinion that to maximize the applicability of future research, RFTs should be used wherever feasible. Educators? What do you think? I'd be interested to hear some perspectives from veteran teachers that are actually in the schools where the majority of these RFTs are taking place and not just sitting in a desk all day at Tutor/Mentor Connection like myself.

hasta la proxima
Chris

Tuesday, August 19, 2008

Knowing the Research: What next?

So, now that I've given a brief review of a few mentoring studies in my last two posts and you are now familiar with a handful of the most relevant papers, it is clear that mentoring works. I also addressed some best practices, strategies that maximize the effectiveness of tutor/mentor programs in delivering positive outcomes to youth. However, even if we know the best ways to engage youth with a tutor/mentor and that this mentor/mentee relationship is overwhelmingly beneficial for the youth involved, this still does not ensure that these types of programs will receive ample resources, in terms of both $$$ and volunteers. So, why isn't there more research trying to determine the best ways to mobilize dedicated volunteers and, equally importantly, the most effective ways to retain these volunteers over the long-term, so that the youth can achieve maximum benefits from a relationship with a supportive mentor as they mature and face the struggles of coming of age in a high-poverty neighborhood?

As tutor/mentor programs all over the world find themselves operating on very limited resources, being able to effectively recruit, engage and retain the volunteers who run the programs day-to-day, is absolutely crucial. Therefore, research aiming to determine the most effective ways to keep volunteers engaged in tutor/mentor programs has the potential to make an enormous impact in the lives of countless youth. Additionally, most of the mentoring research focuses on mentoring programs using a Big Brothers/Big Sisters model. However, there are many programs, including ours here at Cabrini Connections, that vary significantly from that model. For instance, the Big Brothers/Big Sisters model emphasizes one on one relationships between mentor and mentee through both in-school, site based mentoring, as well as through one-on-one community-based mentoring where the mentors and mentees meet in the community doing activities of their choosing. How effective is our model compared to the Big Brothers/Big Sisters model or compared to various school-based mentoring programs? Though youth may not stay with the same mentor year after year at our program due to volunteers dropping-out, does the stability of the program staff and coordinators and the overarching structure of a program like Cabrini Connections, with our numerous clubs and other activities, lead to more positive outcomes than programs that do not offer a safe space for youth to come without directly interacting with their mentors? Also, what is the effect of bringing dozens of youth together on a weekly basis to meet with their mentors? Does it lead to better outcomes than simply having youth meet alone with their mentor off-site? Does it lead to the creation of networks of solidarity among the youth who can identify with each other on the basis of shared life experience and work together to improve their situation? Obviously there are a lot of interesting research topics here that are yet to be explored and have the potential to make a great impact in the way tutor/mentor programs are run.

Under the auspices of The Tutor/Mentor Connection, we have a number of online surveys that we use to glean data from the 200+ programs that comprise our network. This will eventually result in a wealth of information that can be used to determine common struggles and problems among various tutor/mentor programs and the most effective strategies for addressing these challenges. However, we are only a small staff and though we can potentially use this data to help identify potential areas of collaboration between programs and possible solutions to common problems, like volunteer retainment, we lack the necessary resources to be able to conduct controlled experiments to quantitatively compare and contrast our methods with those employed by other programs and publish this information in relevant publications. However, there are thousands of researchers in the fields of education and social policy who can and should take an interest in this area and these research questions in order to help hundreds of tutor/mentor organizations like ours in offering the best possible programs to the youth that they serve. Don't we owe it to the kids?

Monday, August 18, 2008

Knowing the Research: The Mentoring Relationship


Hello again! I hope everyone had an enjoyable weekend and that those in Chicago were able to take to the lakefront and soak in both the rays and the incredible display of American air superiority that was the Chicago Air and Water Show. Though I can think of a few better ways our government could have spent the 62 billion in American taxdollars it took to develop the F22 Raptor (supporting tutor/mentor programming for instance), it certainly made for an entertaining afternoon. Anyway, due to the veritable torrent of comments I've received about my last post, I'm going to keep this crazy train rolling and offer my 2nd "Knowing the Research" post, this time dedicated to the theme of "The Mentoring Relationship".

So, I realize that I've been throwing around the term tutoring/mentoring without ever explicitly defining what they mean to us. For a thorough discussion of these terms please see http://www.tutormentorexchange.net/partner/cc/Presentations/defining_terms/Defining%20terms.pdf

For this post, I will be focusing on the importance of mentors as adults who, along with parents, provides young people with support, counsel, friendship, reinforcement and constructive example. To youth, they serve as a guide, a friend, a listener, a coach and a responsive adult. Tutors, on the other hand, play a primarily academic role, helping youth to learn and excel in their coursework. Obviously, in order to succeed, youth need people in their lives that fill both of these roles. Luckily most of us lucky enough to have grown up in the absence of poverty have benefited from engaged parents and teachers who have fulfilled both of these roles for us and allowed us to reach our full potential. However, youth growing up in high-poverty areas of the inner city not only often lack the opportunities and resources to attend high-performing schools that will engage them academically, but also overwhelmingly lack the types of father figures, or other adult role models that can help them surmount the obstacles they face in their neighborhoods, stay in school and enter a career by their mid twenties. Even when kids are bussed into high performing schools like Lincoln Park High School, which many of our students attend, without the support of engaged adult role models, these children are at a disadvantage and unlikely to reach their maximum potential. This is why it is so important to get this kids involved with a dedicated mentor through organizations such as Cabrini Connections, not just someone who can help them with their homework once a week.

For instance, a recent study demonstrated that youth who had been matched with a dedicated mentor for 12 months or longer showed significant improvements in feelings of self-worth and social acceptance, feelings of scholastic competence, improved parent relations, with decreases in drug and alcohol use. However, youth whose matches terminated before three months showed significant regressions in self-worth and feelings of scholastic competence compared even to a control group who received no mentoring at all. (1) This underlines the importance of the first few months of the mentoring relationship and argues for the importance of good volunteer screening and training so that they're ready to effectively engage these youth right off the bat with tried and true techniques. Unsurprisingly, the strongest predictor of relationship length, was the youth's reported quality of the mentoring relationship. Therefore, besides employing techniques that improve relationship quality between mentors and youth, we need to do all we can to keep mentors and mentees together over the long term so that youth can maximally benefit from this long-term involvment and investment in thier future. This underscores the importance of long term planning for volunteer retainment and relationship building with other tutor/mentor programs for younger youth that feed into our program, such as Cabrini-Green Tutoring Program Inc, which serves elementary youth in the neighborhood. These types of partnerships between programs allow mentors to potentially stay with kids from elementary school through HS graduation and develop networks of support that maximize the child's potential for future success.

In facilitating these successful mentoring relationships, we can benefit from taking note of the findings of a recent study that evaluated 10 different mentoring programs. Like the aforementioned studies, they found that mentoring led to fewer absences, better school attitudes and behavior, and increased college attendance as well as decreased decrease drug and alcohol use, especially among minority participants (2). Interestingly, students involved in mentoring benefited from improved parent-peer relations and improved attitudes about adults in general as well as an increased desire to help others. The researchers hypothesized that these improvements in relationships with parents, peers, and the community as a whole in turn lead to improvements in the youth’s self-esteem and sense of self-worth.

Additionally, they found that the more interaction mentors and mentees had, the more effective the relationship was judged to be by the youth involved and the better their long-term outcomes were. They also found it beneficial for programs to use shared interests between mentor and mentee as a primary factor for matching up youth.
As I said in my last post, it is important for tutor/mentor programs to be aware of this research and use it to help guide their programs and make them as effective as possible using their limited resources. I hope that these research summaries can help show how beneficial this work is in helping program coordinators determine what works and what doesn't and, more importantly, helps show how well designed studies and research papers, when aimed at the right audience, can help to improve the lives of countless youth.

Chau pescado!

(1) Grossman, J.B. and Rhodes, J.E. (2002). The Test of Time: Predictors and Effects of Duration in Youth Mentoring. American Journal of Community Psychology, Vol. 30, No. 2.
(2) Moore, K.A., Kekielek, S. and Hair, E.C. (2002). Mentoring Programs and Youth Development: A Synthesis, Child Trends

Tuesday, August 12, 2008

Knowing the research

Welcome back faithful readers (all 131 of you according to google analytics)! Since the first research project I conducted at Northwestern University, a meta-analysis entitled: "Training Spatial Skills: What Works, for Whom and for How Long?" was just recently submitted to Psychological Bulletin for publication (woo hoo!), I thought this would be a good time to share findings from some recent tutoring/mentoring research and discuss how they can help us in our quest to promote effective tutoring/mentoring here at Cabrini Connections and elsewhere.

As tutoring/mentoring programs such as ours and Big Brothers/Big Sisters become more and more widespread, there has been an increasing amount of research both evaluating individual programs, as well as synthesizing previous work, such as by using the same meta-analytic methods we employed in the aforementioned paper.

By the way, for the uninitiated, a meta-analysis essentially involves collecting data from a number of previous studies that all were investigating a related hypothesis and then analyzing that data to draw further inferences. For example, in our study, we wanted to know what types of trainings could improve children and adults' spatial abilities and for how long. So we collected hundreds of studies that looked at the effectiveness of particular types of training and then analyzed them all together in order to determine if they indeed can be improved with training and, if so, what the best ways to improve them are.

One of the most significant studies pertaining to tutoring/mentoring was published in 2000 and looked at just under 1000 youth who participated in Big Brothers/Big Sisters (BB/BS) programs around the country (1). Like any good experiment, it had a control group, roughly 500 kids who applied for a mentor at BB/BS but were not placed with one, that was compared with an experimental group, the other 500 kids who WERE placed with a mentor. This study found that kids who were paired up with a mentor at BB/BS:

-- were 46% less likely to initiate drug use

-- were 26% less likely to initiate alcohol use (that number reaches 50 percent for the girls in the programs)

-- were 33% less likely to hit someone

--Skipped half as many days of school

--Reported improved parent and peer relationships (this was especially true among boys)

Above all else, these results demonstrated conclusively that MENTORING WORKS and are cited by organizations such as ours to argue for the effectiveness of our programming and why it is necessary for the kids we serve. By showing the effectiveness of mentoring in a well-thought out, controlled and published experiment, this study laid the groundwork for future investigations into the effectiveness of particular types of tutoring/mentoring and specific programmatic content.

One of these such studies that analyzed different mentoring methods with the intent to determine the most effective practices, was a meta-analysis published in 2002. This study looked at 55 different studies with 575 effect sizes (quantifiable changes in the youth served). The general finding was that, when taken as a whole, mentoring programs do provide a positive impact on youth, but not as large as might have been expected. As might be expected, this news was a bit unsettling for many people in the mentoring community, since this wasn't an analysis of one particular mentoring program, but rather 55 programs, utilizing many different techniques, and it didn't report the huge positive impacts found in the aforementioned study and others.

However, the real benefit of this study is in the so-called "moderators of impact". These are the personal traits of the mentors and mentees, structures of the particular programs and the characteristics of the mentor-mentee relationships. When these "moderators" are examined, a much sunnier picture of youth mentoring is revealed. For example:

--The programs in the study that provided ongoing training for mentors, offered matches structured activities, set firm requirements around frequency of mentor-mentee contact,
offered mentor support services, or found ways to increase parent involvement showed
a greater impact. All these factors were strong predictors of higher outcomes for youth.

--The programs where youth felt most positive about their relationships also had the best outcomes.

--The impact of mentoring seemed to be greatest for youth who were most at-risk. Here is evidence that mentoring helps those who need it most. (i.e. youth living in extreme poverty such as that found in Cabrini Green and other housing projects all around Chicago).

Thus, this study really is a strong argument for the value of program quality. Simply signing a child up for a tutor/mentor program and sticking them in a room with an adult without careful consideration of the program structure is not going to lead to the most ideal outcomes for the youth (or the volunteer). Exhibit A: Ricky Hendon's $20,000 tutor grant scandal that broke last month. http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/chi-afterschooljul20,0,6218298.story and http://nicolecabrini.blogspot.com/2008/07/answering-20000-question.html

Therefore, to ensure the best outcomes, programs such as ours need to take advantage of this research and offer useful training for our volunteers, create an environment and program structure that fosters the formation of strong mentor-mentee relationships and increase parent involvement, all things we are working hard to address here at Cabrini Connections. For example, I just finished creating the student and volunteer orientation packets that were carefully designed to help volunteers not only maximize their impact at the beginning of the school year, as they meet with their mentee, but also to help give them ideas and tools to strengthen the mentor-mentee bond. Additionally, this year we are organizing our first ever Welcome Back Brunch, which will give mentors an additional opportunity to meet their youth mentee's parents before the school-year starts and engage with them in a friendly and comfortable atmosphere so they can begin to work together to maximize their child's potential!

As you can see just from this brief post about a pair of mentoring studies, being familiar with the relevant research can greatly assist an organization such as ours to offer the best possible mentoring programming for our youth. Therefore I think it is especially important as someone who has gained a familiarity with the way this work is done and reported, to summarize and share this knowledge with people and organizations who can benefit.

Anyway, with this in mind, I'm thinking about doing a regular feature in my blog about the importance of "Knowing the Research". Any thoughts? I'd love some feedback on whether people would find this sort of thing interesting. Also, I can try to make the writing even less technical if I'm losing people with jargon. I've never done this before, so any constructive criticism would be much appreciated!

Chau!


(1)Tierney, J.P., Grossman, J.B., and Resch, N.L. (2000). Making a Difference: An Impact Study of Big Brothers/Big Sisters. Public/Private Ventures

2)DuBois, D.L., Holloway, B.E., Valentine, J.C., and Cooper, H. (2002). Effectiveness of Mentoring Programs for Youth: A Meta-Analytic Review. American Journal of Community Psychology, Vol. 30, No. 2.