This action research study explored the use of mentorship as an intervention to improve the attendance chronically absent ninth grade students at an urban high school. Chronic absenteeism is a phenomenon with multiple compounding negative impacts on students. Moreover, it is a complicated problem with multiple contributing factors and potential…

A history of trauma can have a significant negative impact on the functioning of a student in the school environment. Check & Connect, a school engagement and dropout intervention program, has been found to have positive effects on student school engagement and decrease the likelihood of dropping out of school. However, a review of the Check…

This study examined the effects of Reading Intervention for Adolescents (RIA) and a mentoring intervention (MI) implemented for 1 year with ninth-grade English learners (ELs) with reading difficulties. Eligible students enrolled at three urban high schools were randomly assigned to the RIA (n = 142), MI (n = 163), RIA and MI (n = 164), or…

To promote a STEM career pipeline, a mentor outreach program was created within a K-12 charter school network, with a pilot year focusing on eighth and ninth-grade students. Utilizing a small cohort of volunteers from a nearby community college as student mentors and one faculty member, 12 visits were conducted throughout the school year. The…

This study explored whether Latinx adolescents' ethnic identity and stressful experiences predicted characteristics of their naturally-occurring mentoring relationships with non-parental adults. Ninth-grade Latinx students completed surveys about ethnic identity, stress exposure, and their natural mentoring relationships during 9th and 10th grade.…

Local, state and national data show that graduation rates for African Americans lag behind White students. This problem has existed for decades, and African American students may not have the proper support to succeed. Further, research has shown that bonding or school connectedness can lead to better graduation outcomes. One approach that may…

This study aimed to (a) identify mentoring quality profiles based on characteristics of informal mentoring relationships, (b) examine how mentor and youth demographic characteristics were related to the profiles, and (c) investigate whether the profiles were related to youth's academic outcomes. Participants were 411 ninth-grade urban, low-income…

Mentoring is one avenue to support Latinx adolescents in their positive development. The current study examined the roles of stressors and interpersonal trust toward adults in the formation and quality (instrumental and relational) of natural mentoring relationships. Participants were 347 Latinx adolescents who were surveyed in the 9th and 10th…

The purpose of this study was to explore how high school students mentored beginning fifth-grade students in an extracurricular music class for double-reed instruments. In this study, I investigated the role of peer mentoring with how high school mentors shared their knowledge and experiences, and the role of the teacher in this process. The…

The Guyanese Girls Code (GGC) training program, established in 2018, is aimed at increasing female participation in ICT. As a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, the program shifted to virtual operations to ensure the safety of participants and instructors. This presented an opportunity to contribute to the growing body of research that has been…

This study explores how public-school teachers who host student teachers in urban, grade 7-12 classrooms (referred to as cooperating teachers or classroom mentors in this study) define their role in preparing pre-service teachers. This study is particularly interested in yielding insight into how participants describe the "practice" of…

Background: South Africa's "Language-in-Education Policy" (LiEP) provides for bi/multilingual education, but schools are only supported to choose monolingual English language policies from Grade 4 and ignore the learners' home language or languages as resources for learning. Many teachers translanguage orally, using the learners' home…

The Promise Fellow Program is an intervention designed to prevent dropout amongst students in grades 6-12 in Minnesota that show early warning signs of school disengagement. The program is led by interventionists known as Promise Fellows and provides three research-based supports that align with the National Dropout Prevention Center's "Basic…

This study examined the association between participation in a school-based group-mentoring program (Project Arrive) and academic outcomes in a group of ninth-grade students who had been identified as at high risk of high-school dropout (n = 239). Comparison participants were ninth-grade students with similar levels of risk (n = 980). Using…

Academic discourse communities and learning circles are characterized by collaboration, sharing commonalities in terms of social interactions and language. The discourse of these communities is composed of jargon, common terminologies, and similarities in how they construe and communicate meaning. This study examines the extent to which discourse…