Summer Youth Employment Programs (SYEPs) help connect youth to opportunities for career exploration, skill development, and mentorship. Despite heightened investment in SYEPs, research regarding positive impacts is limited. Most of the common SYEP evaluation strategies are rooted in deficit thinking and focus on outcomes such as reducing violent…

Limited entrepreneurial training programs are offered in higher education that address the hurdles, issues, knowledge, and experiences of female entrepreneurs. In addition, few opportunities are available for the intrapersonal skill and self-efficacy development needed by female entrepreneurs to be successful. Few theoretical studies on female…

For more than 25 years, MENTOR: The National Mentoring Partnership has provided the youth mentoring field with a set of researched-informed and practitioner-approved practices for creating and sustaining positive and impactful mentoring relationships and strong program services. The fourth edition of "The Elements of Effective Practice for…

Recent work in environmental psychology and education emphasizes environmental identity as important in predicting a broad array of environmental behaviors. However, there are gaps in understanding how other social identities interact with environmental identity. We conducted semi-structured interviews with 30 undergraduate students from diverse…

In recent years, nurture groups (NGs) have maintained a positive growth whereas targeted youth work in schools has diminished. Transition into secondary education is a crucial time for a young person, and this research examines the crossovers between youth work and nurture groups, exploring how these interventions support transition for young…

Preparing college students to be active contributors to the next generation is an important function of higher education. This assumption about generativity forms a cornerstone in this mixed methods study that examined generativity levels among 273 college students at a 4-year public university. MANCOVA results indicated that college students who…

Students learn best when teachers get out of the way. Unfortunately, university classrooms continue to be intensely teacher-centric, are driven by the teacher's agenda and calendar, and embrace simple models rather than complex alternatives. These simple types of learning environments frustrate students' development of the risk-­taking and choice…

The purpose of this study was to examine students' perceptions of mentoring in a university cooperative education (co-op) program. Within this setting, students report to a supervisor. This supervisor has direct responsibility for the student and may influence the quality of the co-op experience by providing a mentoring role. A need existed to…

In order to develop an understanding of mentoring relationships and the impact these relationships might have on the development of high-risk adolescent females, this qualitative study explored the relationships between six "Little Sisters" and their Big Sisters mentors. The purposefully-selected sample included women and girls who were actively…

This paper reports on an element of a long term research project on the development of a conceptual framework for the training of mentors of beginning teachers. Three aspects are being investigated: (1) mentors' perceptions about mentoring; (2) the relation between mentors' perceptions and their actions in practice; and (3) the effect of mentoring…

This study examined the effectiveness of Minnesota Mainstream, a program serving professional individuals with psychiatric disabilities. The study also examined common career patterns among professional persons with psychiatric disabilities. Program participants (N=187), staff, and mentors were interviewed. Data were analyzed in terms of…