This study’s findings support the effectiveness of mentoring for improving outcomes across behavioral, social, emotional, and academic domains of young people’s development. The most common pattern of benefits is for mentored youth to exhibit positive gains on outcome measures while nonmentored youth exhibit declines. It appears then that mentoring as an intervention strategy has the capacity to serve both promotion and prevention aims. Programs also show evidence of being able to affect multiple domains of youth functioning simultaneously and to improve selected outcomes of policy interest (e.g., academic achievement test scores).
DuBois, D. L., Portillo, N., Rhodes, J. E., Silverthorn, N., & Valentine, J. C. (2011). How effective are mentoring programs for youth?: A systematic assessment of the evidence. Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 12(2), 57-91. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1529100611414806