The effectiveness of school mentoring in promoting the socioemotional and instrumental development of youngsters

Abstract

The present article is a survey of the literature on the effectiveness of school mentoring programs in promoting the socioemotional and instrumental development of youngsters. It starts with a comparison between the most significant empirical investigations on the subject. From such analysis it is possible to observe that the results attributed to mentoring programs are contradictory and tend to be of reduced magnitude. Various methodological weaknesses seem to affect the results obtained in the majority of the works analyzed, amongst which the reduced size of samples and the lack of experimental control of the inherent variability of the subjects. Alongside these methodological limitations, the literature survey carried out here also allowed to identify important variations in the structure of the school mentoring programs, and an uneven weighing of the parameters defining good practices. All these factors seem to make it difficult to obtain solid results about the effectiveness of the kind of school intervention. The recommendations made here for future investigations on this theme include conducting more studies with inferential power about well-structured programs, a greater care in the definition of investigation plans, and the consideration of the teacher as a figure capable of accumulating the function of mentor, contrary to what happens in programs developed in Anglo-Saxon countries.