Program Profile: Achievement Mentoring Program (AMP)

This is an intervention for urban minority freshmen at risk of dropping out of high school. The goal was to enhance school-related cognitions and behaviors. The program is rated Promising. The program did not statistically significantly impact students’ absences, grade point averages, or decision-making efficacy, but had statistically significant effects on discipline referrals, negative school behavior, performance in mathematics and language arts, and other self-reported outcomes.

A Promising rating implies that implementing the program may result in the intended outcome(s).

Program Goals/Target Population

The goal of the Achievement Mentoring Program (AMP) was to enhance school-related cognitions and behaviors. The intervention targeted urban minority freshmen at risk of dropping out of high school.

Program Activities

AMP activities consisted of weekly meetings during the second semester of a student’s freshman year and monthly booster sessions completed during a student’s second year of high school. AMP mentors were teachers and other school staff who volunteered to be mentors after a brief presentation of the program during a faculty meeting. AMP mentors followed specific, manualized guidelines to fulfill the goals of the program (Bry 2001).

First, mentors independently reviewed each student’s number of days absent, tardiness, and discipline referrals (if any), prior to a weekly meeting with their mentees. The mentors also interviewed one of their students’ teachers concerning progress in class, including any upcoming assignments, and asked the teacher to share any positive things the student had done in the past week. Second, mentors held one-on-one weekly meetings with their mentees for at least 15–20 minutes per meeting. During each meeting, the mentee was given the opportunity to present his or her view of what happened during that past week at school. The mentee was informed of all of the positive things that he or she had done, based on the information collected from school records and the teacher interview. The mentee was also praised for his or her accomplishments. Behaviors that needed improvement were identified, and problem-solving techniques were used to explore how to change the behavior. New behaviors (such as organizing a notebook, doing homework, or talking to a teacher) were practiced during the weekly meetings.

Following each meeting, the mentor informed another person, such as a teacher, of the mentee’s accomplishments and arranged to have this person praise the mentee. Finally, the mentor contacted the mentee’s parents on a monthly basis to inform them of any progress in the student’s behavior. Specifically, mentors informed parents of their children’s positive behavioral progress as a means of providing an opportunity for the mentees to receive additional praise from their parents. During the following school year, mentors were strongly encouraged to meet with their mentees at least monthly for booster sessions.

Program Theory

The program was based on social learning theory (Bandura 1986). Social learning theory suggests that an intervention in a student’s educational environment can influence the student’s academic trajectory due to interrelationships among the environmental, personal, and behavioral domains. AMP provided a mentoring intervention in the youth’s environment with the goal of producing cognitive and behavioral change.

Additional Information

The program was a manualized modification of the Early Secondary Intervention Program (Stanley et al. 1976), now known as the Behavioral Monitoring and Reinforcement Program.

Study 1

Holt and colleagues (2008) evaluated the Achievement Mentoring Program (AMP). Study participants were chosen from a group of 97 students who were receiving a universal prevention program entitled "Peer Group Connection" (PGC; Johnson, Holt, Bry, and Powell, 2008) in an urban public high school. PGC is a year-long, peer outreach program focused on facilitating all 9th graders’ transitions to high school. Study participants were students in PGC who were deemed to be at risk for academic failure after 1 semester of high school. Students were characterized as at risk for academic failure if they exhibited at least two of the following risk factors: low grades and/or academic motivation, discipline problems, and frequent tardiness or absence from school. Using these criteria, 44 students were selected for the evaluation of AMP.

These 44 students were grouped by gender and race/ethnicity, and then randomly assigned in equal numbers to either a treatment group to receive the 5-month AMP intervention or to a control group with no mentoring. Four students were excluded from the sample, resulting in a final sample of 40 students. The composition of the final sample was 58 percent male, 47 percent Latino, 38 percent African American, 5 percent white, and 10 percent other race/ethnicity. There were no observed differences between the treatment and control groups on the outcome measures of interest at the baseline.

Three outcome measures of interest were gathered from school records: 1) number of discipline referrals, 2) number of absences, and 3) grade point average. These measures were obtained for the first semester of the participants' freshman year (before the AMP intervention began), at the end of their freshman year, and at the end of the first semester of their second year of high school (additional outcome measures included students’ self-reported sense of school belonging, decision making, academic efficacy, and perceptions of teacher support; these outcomes were not obtained at the final follow-up, however, and thus are not included in this review.). Analysis of variance (ANOVA) tests were used to test for effects of the intervention on the outcome measures. A Wilcoxon signed-rank test was used to determine whether there was a significant difference between the treatment and control groups in the number of students who received a discipline referral for the first time during the relevant period.

Study 2

Clarke (2009) replicated and extended Holt and colleagues’ (2008) evaluation of the impact of AMP over a period of 2 academic years. Participants who were deemed at risk for academic failure were selected from a pool of students in an urban public high school who were receiving the PGC program. Researchers selected a sample of 39 participants who were 79 percent African American, 18 percent Hispanic American, 3 percent European American, and 44 percent male. Each student selected was paired with a similar selected student based on gender, ethnicity, grades, and attendance and discipline records, in that order of priority. The two members of each pair were then randomly assigned to either a treatment group to receive AMP or to a control group (20 students were assigned to the treatment group, and 19 to the control group).

Treatment and control groups were surveyed at 3 time points: during the first semester of their freshman year (prior to the beginning of the AMP intervention), at the end of their freshman year, and at the end of their second year of high school. School records that reported information on grades and discipline referrals were obtained for each of the 4 semesters of the 2-year study period. By the end of the study, data was available for between 10 and 11 participants in the control group (depending on the outcome measure) and for between 13 and 15 participants in the treatment group. Lack of availability of data at the end of the study was due to various reasons, including dropping out of school, being sent to an alternative school, or being placed out of district. No differences were observed at the baseline comparison between the treatment and control groups on the outcome measures.

Outcome measures included students’ self-reported decision-making efficacy, goal-setting efficacy, perceptions of teacher support, perceptions of classmate acceptance, and negative school behavior as well as school records of grades in mathematics and language arts, and discipline referrals. Researchers tested for effects of the intervention by comparing the treatment and control groups at each available follow-up point. T-tests were used to examine the self-reported outcome measures, and Mann-Whitney U tests were used to examine the discipline referrals. To evaluate effects on academic grades, repeated-measures ANOVA was used to test for group differences in changes of grades over the 4 periods of assessment.

In the Clarke (2009) evaluation of the Achievement Mentoring Program (AMP), program mentors were teachers and other school staff who volunteered to be mentors after a brief presentation of the program during a faculty meeting. Volunteers participated in a 3-hour training session conducted by Dr.Brenna Bry, who developed AMP and authored the manual (Bry 2001), before being chosen as AMP mentors. During the second semester of the program’s first year, Dr. Bry met with each mentor for approximately 20 minutes for 13 weeks: an average of 9.25 times, with the number of meetings ranging from 7–12. She reviewed the program procedures, discussed the progress that was made with each mentee, and problem-solved any issue pertaining to the mentoring relationship or mentee’s progress. During the second semester of the booster session year, Dr. Bry met once a month, for 75 minutes, with the mentors in a group format, designed as a luncheon. During this meeting, the progress and goals of each mentee were discussed with input from other mentors.

Mentors maintained a weekly log during the semester that detailed when they met with each mentee, the length of the interaction, the specific goal(s) discussed, and any plans made for completing the goal(s). During the second semester of the program’s first year, after each weekly meeting with the mentors, the program developer completed a fidelity report indicating which of the 10 program procedures were completed by the mentor. The mentors’ level of compliance with each item of the manualized program ranged between 45 percent and 100 percent, with an overall average of 72.5 percent adherence to the program procedures.

These sources were used in the development of the program profile:

These sources were used in the development of the program profile:

Following are CrimeSolutions-rated programs that are related to this practice:

Mentoring for Youth Development

This practice provides youth with a positive and consistent adult or older youth relationship to promote healthy youth development and social functioning and to reduce risk factors. The practice is rated Effective in reducing delinquency and improving educational outcomes; Promising in improving psychological outcomes and cognitive functioning; and No Effects in reducing substance use.

Evidence Ratings for Outcomes

	Crime & Delinquency - Multiple crime/offense types
	Education - Multiple education outcomes
	Mental Health & Behavioral Health - Psychological functioning
	Mental Health & Behavioral Health - Cognitive functioning
	Mental Health & Behavioral Health - Social functioning
	Drugs & Substance Abuse - Multiple substances

Dropout Prevention Programs

School- or community-based programs targeting frequently absent students or students at risk of dropping out of school. These programs are aimed at increasing school engagement, school attachment, and the academic performance of students, with the main objective of increasing graduation rates. The practice is rated Effective for reducing rates of school dropouts, and rated Promising for improving test scores/grades, graduation rates, and attendance.

Evidence Ratings for Outcomes

	Education - Dropout
	Education - Academic achievement/school performance
	Education - Graduation
	Education - Attendance/truancy

School-Based Interventions to Reduce Exclusion

School exclusion (more commonly known as suspension and expulsion) is broadly defined as a disciplinary measure imposed in reaction to students’ misbehavior. This practice comprises school-based programs that seek to decrease the prevalence of exclusion and thereby reduce the detrimental effects that suspensions or expulsion from schools may have on students’ learning outcomes and future training or employment opportunities. This practice is rated Effective for reducing school exclusion.

Evidence Ratings for Outcomes

Education - Expulsion/Suspension

Why might a practice's outcome ratings differ from the ratings of specific programs encompassed by that practice?