Program Goals/Target Population
Academic Mentoring Program for Educational Development (AMPED) is a one-on-one mentoring program. The goals are to improve academic performance, improve life satisfaction, and decrease absences and behavioral infractions by promoting academic behaviors, enhancing academic motivation, and increasing subjective well-being. The intervention targets middle school students.
Program Components
AMPED consists of eight, 45-minute mentoring sessions that take place in designated mentoring rooms within the middle school during a student’s nonacademic electives or periods (e.g., homeroom) once per week. The sessions follow a mentoring curriculum that targets four sources of self-efficacy (mastery experience, social persuasion, vicarious experience, and positive affective states) and behavioral change through cognitive dissonance and using motivational interviewing (MI) techniques.
Mentors receive training on how to implement the mentoring curriculum via direct instruction, role playing, and performance feedback, using MI (see Implementation Information for more information). To facilitate behavior change through cognitive dissonance, mentors help mentees sort various values (e.g., “making my parents proud”, “being happy”, “making good decisions”) into very important, important, and not important categories and use those values identified as very important to help mentees set goals. Mentors encourage mentees to explore and resolve any inconsistencies between their values and their behavior in a non-confrontational manner, using MI conversational techniques and affirming mentee actions that are consistent with mentee values.
To facilitate mastery experiences, mentors help their mentees set achievable goals connected to their values and teach them academic skills (e.g., study skills, organization) to maximize their chances of reaching their goals. Mentors provide feedback and guidance as mentees pursue their goals and provide vicarious learning by sharing current and previous personal challenges and successes. Mentors also use free time, affirmations, casual conversations, and play to promote positive affective experiences with their mentees.
Mentors complete a checklist of each session’s procedures that include specific agenda items and tasks pertinent to the activities expected of the mentors during that session. Mentors receive brief, onsite supervision prior to each session to review the curriculum and following each session to check for compliance.
Program Theory
The program is based on a brief mentoring model (Spencer and Rhodes 2005) and grounded in the following theories of behavior change: social–cognitive theory (Bandura 1997), cognitive–dissonance theory (Draycott and Dabbs, 1998), and theory of motivational interviewing (Miller and Ross 2009). Consistent with these theories, the program aims to enhance students’ self-efficacy and outcome expectations by including structural goal-setting and performance feedback, creating opportunities for identifying and resolving inconsistencies between their attitudes and behaviors, and using a client-centered model that encourages a flexible and reciprocal relationship between mentor and mentee while also accommodating goal-focused activities for the mentee such as academic skills training. Further, mentor training and supervision are based on the augmented Kilpatrick model of training, which proposes that successful knowledge and skill transfer is promoted using the following four levels of evaluation: reaction (appraisals of how useful the training is), learning (transfer of knowledge), behavioral performance (transfer of skill), and results (transfer of competency; Alliger et al. 1997).
Key Personnel
Mentors are undergraduate students recruited from classes in departments linked to helping professions such as social work, human development and family studies, and psychology. Site supervisors are doctoral students in school psychology who conduct the matching process and lead all training and supervision sessions using the structured pre- and post-meeting protocol. Supervisors receive training and practice in supervising mentors. Each supervisor also had previously served as a mentor in the program (McQuillin and Lyon 2016).
Additional Information
This program is a revised version of a previously reviewed program called Brief Instrumental School-Based Mentoring Program. The revised program, which includes enhancements to mentor training and supervision and to the program curriculum, was different from the previous version, therefore it was reviewed as a new program. For example, the revised program expands mentor training to include an initial online training module, two in-person training sessions, and three supplemental online trainings. In the revised program, mentor training is based on the application of social–cognitive theory and cognitive–dissonance theory, in addition to the theory of motivational interviewing, and incorporates a training model proven effective for successful knowledge and skill transfer (the augmented Kirkpatrick model of training).
