Examining effects of dosage on outcomes for a school-based mentoring program

Background: San Francisco Unified School District's Mentoring for Success project serves 431 mentees at 32 schools. Services are prioritized for students facing barriers to school connectivity and needing enhanced social, emotional, and academic supports. Students are matched with a mentor and meet weekly for 60 minutes. Purpose: The program seeks to improve attendance, grade point average (GPA), and feelings of connectedness to caring adults at school. This paper explores effects of program dosage (i.e. weekly minutes) on these program indicators. Significance: In a resource restricted environment, examining the effectiveness of the mentoring program provides data to guide programmatic decisions, such as dosage and expansion. Methodology: Data were drawn from self-reported baseline and post surveys from students, attendance and GPA scores, and web-based logs completed by mentors. Two sets of regression analyses were tested--one with dosage and the other with “mentor satisfaction” as the independent variable. The analyses examined relationships between the independent variable and students' reported level of relationships with caring adults at school, attendance, GPA and post-secondary aspirations, controlling for baseline and outcome-specific covariates. Findings: Higher average weekly minutes of mentor-mentee contact was significantly associated with fewer absences reported for students over the course of a school year (p = .02). Higher satisfaction with mentor relationship was also significantly associated with higher levels of relationships with caring adults at school (p=.00), and post-secondary aspirations (p=.02). Conclusions: This study demonstrates that time spent with mentors and mentor satisfaction increase desired program outcomes, and are important elements of school-based mentoring programs.