School‐based mentoring programs are popular prevention programs thought to influence youth development; but rigorous evaluations indicate that these programs often have small effects on youth outcomes. Researchers suggest that these findings may be explained by (a) mentors and mentees failing to develop a close relationship and (b) mentors not setting goals or focusing on specific skills necessary improve outcomes. We assessed these explanations using data from approximately 1360 mentor and mentee pairs collected through a national study of school‐based mentoring (called, “The Student Mentoring Program”). Specifically, we tested the influence of mentee‐reported relationship quality and mentor‐reported use of goal‐setting and feedback‐oriented activities on academic, behavioral, and social‐emotional outcomes. Results suggested that youth reported relationship quality was associated with small to medium effects on outcomes. Moreover, goal‐setting and feedback‐oriented activities were associated with moderate to large effects on outcomes. We also found significant interactions between relationship quality and goal‐setting and feedback‐oriented activities on youth outcomes. We conclude that there appears to be a “sweet‐spot” wherein youth outcomes are maximized. The results of this study suggest a need for school‐based mentoring programs to monitor and support mentors in developing a close relationship while also providing opportunities to set goals and receive feedback.

We examined data from a nationally implemented mentoring program over a 4‐year period, to identify demographic and relationship characteristics associated with premature termination. Data were drawn from a sample of 82,224 mentor and mentees. We found matches who reported shared racial or ethnic identities were associated with lower likelihood of premature termination as was mentee's positive feelings of the relationship. We also found that, if data were used as a screening tool, the data were suboptimal for accuracy classifying premature closure with sensitivity and specificity values equal to 0.43 and 0.75. As programs and policymakers consider ways to improve the impact of mentoring programs, these results suggest programs consider the types of data being collected to improve impact of care.

Adolescents who report high levels of satisfaction with their life tend to have better grades in school, fewer behavior problems, and positive long-term outcomes. For this reason, there is a growing interest in understanding how schools can promote life satisfaction. In this study, we examined how social support for learning (i.e., support provided by families, teachers, and peers related to learning) relates to adolescent life satisfaction. Further, we tested how this type of social support moderates the effect of stressful life events as a predictor of adolescent life satisfaction cross-sectionally and over a 6-month period. Cross sectional analyses revealed that peer, teacher, and family social support for learning had a small, but significant, association with life satisfaction (beta-weights between 0.10 and 0.21) and that peer support significantly moderated stressful life events (β = −.035). After a 6-month period, family support for learning was observed to have a significant main effect (β = .187) and moderated life stress (β = −0.109); but no other significant effects were observed. The results of this study suggest that social support for learning may be one malleable construct schools consider assessing to understand school-factors that influence student life satisfaction. In addition, schools may consider interventions that target family social support for learning, especially for students experiencing significant life stressors as one way to promote life satisfaction.