Mentoring

FOCUS AREAS

OVERVIEW

Mentoring provides role models, social connectedness and a sense of belonging, and skills development for millions of youth and young adults. iRT studies mentoring as well as develops tools and services to support mentoring programs to maximize their impact on mentees.

Mentoring typically refers to an adult, older, or more experienced peer (the mentor) who is engaged in a non-professional helping relationship with a young person or peer (the mentee). The goals of this relationship can include primarily friendship, or helping the mentee explore his or her interests, or more specific goals, like learning a new skill.

Across the U.S., millions of youth are involved in mentoring relationships and there are thousands of formal and informal mentoring programs. These programs are operated by community-based organizations, schools, and faith-based organizations that support mentors in interacting with their mentee or mentees in a variety of settings. Some mentoring programs target any youth who could benefit from a caring, supportive relationship and others are more specific, such as targeting youth with a disability, youth in foster care, immigrant youth, children of incarcerated parents, adolescents involved in the juvenile justice system, and children in military families.

OUR WORK

iRT has made important contributions to basic and applied research in the field of mentoring, as well as creating empirically validated and research-informed tools for use by practitioners.

Training

Research suggests that mentors, mentees, and their parent or guardian should all complete training before they meet for the first time to help prepare them for developing an effective mentoring relationship. Ongoing training should also be completed on relevant topics, as they arise during the life of the mentoring relationship.

iRT has contributed to research on training, as well as developed over 10 online and in-person training courses for mentors, mentees, and their parents. Courses have been custom designed for use by a range of different types of mentoring programs from in-person community-based mentoring, to school or site-based mentoring, to e-mentoring. The training topics cover the preparation for the mentoring relationship, ethics and safety issues in mentoring, strategically using mentoring to support educational outcomes in mentees, how substance use can impact the mentoring relationship, and training to teach high-school and college students’ relationship- and network building skills.

The impact of mentoring on mentees can vary greatly from program to program and is dependent, in large part, on the practices of the program. Several decades of research on mentoring have allowed for the identification of specific practices that are known to contribute to more effective mentoring programs. A guide of research-based, practitioner-informed practices for mentoring programs, the Elements of Effective Practice for Mentoring, Fourth Edition (EEPM; Garringer, Kupersmidt, Rhodes, Stelter, & Tai, 2015), was written by a team of researchers and practitioners, and it constitutes the gold standard for best practices in the field of mentoring.

For 10 years, iRT scientists have been key members of the team of researchers and practitioners developing research-based program practices for the mentoring field. In addition to our contributions to the EEPM, we have created and evaluated the Elements Quality Improvement Process, a web-based tool that allows mentoring programs to assess their alignment with the mentoring best practices and to receive tailored feedback and technical assistance to improve the quality of their program.

In addition to our work developing resources for mentoring programs, researchers at iRT have completed several research projects to study the prevalence of adherence, as well as the impact of the implementation of the practices recommended in the EEPM.

Research and evaluation

Research is at the center of all our work in mentoring.

We rely on research to inform the resources we create for mentoring programs.
We conduct research on the resources we develop to determine if they are effective in achieving the desired outcomes.
We conduct basic research to better understand how mentoring works.
We help mentoring programs to evaluate their own programs to determine if their programs are effective in achieving their desired outcomes.

TEAM

Dr. Katie Stump conducts research on the implementation of mentoring program best practices and the impact of practices on mentoring outcomes. She is the statistician across many mentoring evaluations, including a large, multisite randomized controlled trial project to evaluate mentoring program enhancements for programs serving children with an incarcerated parent. Dr. Stump has expertise in the areas of social development, peer relations, and quantitative methodology and analysis.

Dr. Rebecca Stelter has a personal interest in youth mentoring that began with her 10-year involvement as a Big Sister in the Big Brothers Big Sisters program. She is a co-author of the Elements of Effective Practice for Mentoring (EEPM), Third and Fourth Editions, and the recent Supplements to the EEPM. She conducts research on mentoring program best practices and training for mentors, mentees, parents, and mentoring program staff.

Dr. Janis Kupersmidt is a co-author of the Elements of Effective Practice for Mentoring (EEPM), Third and Fourth Editions, and the recent Supplements to the EEPM. She conducts research examining the prevalence of the practices described in the EEPM among mentoring programs and how implementation of the EEPM practices is associated with mentoring relationship and mentee outcomes. Her research also focuses on the importance of training in mentoring programs.