RESEARCH & EVALUATION

Research has shown mentoring to be a viable tool for broadly supporting children's growth, but directors of mentoring programs are increasingly looking to mentoring as a means of efficiently addressing specific concerns (most notably academic achievement). However, for mentoring to be used as such a precise instrument, the directors need answers to specific questions about how to account for factors that have as yet received little research attention.
These include:

* the age of children to be mentored, especially what approaches work best for elementary-aged children;
* the setting where mentoring occurs, including questions such as how to value school-based mentoring (and the atmosphere of learning it provides) against community-based mentoring (which may provide less support of academic growth); and,
* how much time and money to spend on training and supervising mentors.

Project IF seeks to provide these answers where they do not exist through rigorous, large-scale action research.

Each of the mentoring programs with which Project IF works is a well-established, successful organization that employs a variety of mentoring strategies to help students improve their academics and grow personally. These programs strive to provide the most effective, cost-efficient services and have asked Project IF to help them understand which practices are most closely tied to positive outcomes for the children. We do so by analyzing students' academic histories, surveys carefully selected or developed for this work, and selective interviews with the participants.

This work serves Project IF's broader mission of helping children build bright futures by bolstering the mentoring programs that serve them. Some of the findings we obtain at the exemplary programs we study in Boston, New York City, and Prescott, Arizona, can be generalized to guide programs nationwide. More directly, our efforts help children in each of the three cities in several ways:

* We help the mentoring programs evaluate the efficacy of their services so that they can understand what to change-and what not to-to help children the most.
* We help mentoring programs raise money to continue providing services. Today, most funders require some form of evaluation of the services they support, and our reporting helps the programs demonstrate their commitment to providing the best. [sample report]
* We help the program recruit and maintain mentors. Most mentors fail to appreciate how profoundly they can affect a child. Active mentors often miss the subtle growth they have facilitated. Our reporting and presentations we make to active and prospective mentors help them value the relationships the can offer children.

For more information regarding Project IF's Research, please contact John Harris.