Mentor/Role Models: I Have A Dream Project

By Jabari Mahiri

Mentor/Role Models: "I Have A Dream" Project PROGRAM VISION/GOALS/MISSION This project completed the second year of a 10 year intervention with 60 focal students who have now finished the 5th grade at Prescott Elementary School in the Oakland Unified School District (OUSD). The project collaborators (Jabari Mahiri, P.I. and Associate Professor, UCB Graduate School of Education; David Stark, Director, Stiles Hall; and Martha Cook, President, I Have a Dream Foundation - Oakland) intended to accomplish five specific goals with these students using the Berkeley Pledge Grant and other funding for the 1998-99 academic year. These five specific goals are aligned with four long-term goals.

The first goal for this academic year was to coordinate sustained academic and social support by providing UC Berkeley undergraduate mentor/tutors to work with each focal student for an hour-and-a-half per day, two afternoons per week and by also providing a variety of group, social activities and outings for these students and their mentors. The second goal was to provide extra literacy-focused support to particular students who were identified as reading two or more grade levels behind 5th grade. The third goal was to create and sustain higher levels of parental involvement and support in the literacy development of these students. The fourth goal was that 80% of the mentors themselves experience significant personal/professional transformation and appreciation for the value of doing community service. Based on the first four goals, the fifth goal was to have at least 50% of these students significantly improve their grades and competency in reading -- specifically in vocabulary development and in reading comprehension as measured by standardized tests and other school records, and to have at least a 30% increase in homework completion, school attendance, and pro-social behavior as indicated by school records, and student, parent and teacher surveys.

All five of these goals were achieved (and often exceeded) during this academic year. Sufficient undergraduate volunteer mentors were recruited, given literacy and social development training, assigned mentees based on considerations of gender, ethnicity, and socioeconomic backgrounds, and supported and sustained in their academic and interpersonal work with all of the focal students for the entire academic year. Twenty of these mentors were provided with additional training and financial compensation through America Reads funding in order to give more targeted literacy support to twenty of the students who were farthest behind their grade levels in reading. Parental involvement and support in the project was significantly increased in several ways, but especially through the implementation of Family Reading Nights every other Monday evening. Finally, standardized tests and other school measures and records show that significant gains were made in students' reading scores, grades, and attendance.

The project collaborators also intend to accomplish four long-term goals over the course of this 10 year intervention by continuing to follow and facilitate the academic and social development of these focal students as they progress through the twelfth grade. The first long-term goal is to increase their eventual high school graduation rate to 100%. The second is to increase their post-secondary school admissions rate to at least 50% of the original number of focal students. The third is for approximately 10% of these students to be UC eligible by the time they graduate from high school. The fourth is to have 75% of the non-college bound students from this cohort be able to complete pre-apprenticeships and secure union or other skilled jobs.

The project will also provide follow-up accounts on focal students who leave the OUSD (and thus the project), and it will document their reasons for leaving along with their levels and histories of academic development at the time of departure.

Research Questions

• What is the impact of sustained mentoring and tutoring on the academic achievement of students from severely disadvantaged academic backgrounds?
  

• What is the social developmental impact of this project on these students?

• What are the problems and possibilities for student development when making significant ethnic and gender matches between the mentors and the mentees?

• What are the effects of engaging in sustained mentoring and tutoring of these students on the college mentors?

Target Group

All of the initial 60 participants who were served by this project were in the 5th grade at Prescott Elementary School, OUSD. Over 90% of these students are African Americans and all come from low-income families. There was a 12% attrition rate, so that 53 students were served through the end of the academic year. Twenty-one of these students also were served by America Reads Program. The students were in the 5th grade classes of four teachers, two of whom were without credentials and in their first year of teaching in subject areas other than their majors.

METHODS/PROCEDURES

The center-piece of this intervention strategy is the mentoring relationships established between the undergraduate students recruited from UC Berkeley and the focal elementary school mentees. These committed undergraduates (like the original character named Mentor in The Odyssey who was entrusted to nurture and educate Telemachus while his father Odysseus was away fighting in the Trojan Wars) are trained and facilitated in developing relationships with their mentees that are based on trust and mutual respect.

A number of studies have shown the ameliorative value of good mentor/mentee relationships. A recent example is the report from the United States Justice Department's Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention. In its 1998 Report to Congress on "Juvenile Mentoring Programs" code named JUMP it provided evidence that the first 93 of these JUMP projects "helped to reduce crime among young people and strengthen(ed) school performance. It found that kids with mentors were 46 percent less likely to use drugs, 27 percent less likely to start using alcohol, 33 percent less likely to hit someone and 50 percent more likely to go to class." (Reported in Youth Today, March 1999).

Our particular project draws on theoretical contributions from Vygotsky regarding learning and social development. In exploring how learners appropriate new forms of discourse and thinking through interactions with others, his work provides a framework for conceptualizing the learning process that emphasizes its social nature. Vygotsky argued that it was not only the intersection of biological determinants, but also the dynamic social interaction between a learner and a more knowledgeable other that caused development. He suggested that the possibilities for learning through this dynamic social interaction could be seen as a "zone of proximal development." He defined this as "the distance between the actual development level as determined by independent problem solving and the level of potential development as determined through problem solving under adult guidance or in collaboration with more capable peers" (Vygotsky, 1978: 86).

Vera John-Steiner, a contemporary Vygotskian theorist, further emphasizes the active and collaborative role of participants in the learning process and accentuates the mutual appropriation and co-construction of knowledge between both experts and novices. In addition to being reciprocal, she also notes that the process of internalization comes through multiple sources (John-Steiner, 1996). This project recognizes that the mentors must not only be able to teach, they must also be willing to learn. It is this dynamic process of teaching and learning that they are modeling and molding in the sustained contacts -- the multiple zones of academic and social development -- with their mentees.

While educational research suggests that there are many general benefits of mentoring for mentees as well as for mentors, it also shows that mentoring programs in education are complex, highly situational, and provide very limited documentation of specific outcomes regarding improvements in mentee skills and performance (Head & Thies-Ssprinthall (1992). The effectiveness of this project's mentoring intervention strategy is tied to the high level of collaboration of several academic and academic support entities -- Berkeley's Graduate School of Education, Stiles Hall Community Organization, the "I Have a Dream" Foundation (IHAD), the America Reads Program, and the Oakland Unified School District. Key representatives from the first three entities have committed to a ten year collaboration to see the mentorship, monitoring, and academic support of the 60 focal students through to their graduation from high school and at least the first year beyond.

Upon graduation, the "I Have a Dream" Foundation will provide a full, four-year scholarship for focal students to attend any college or university to which they qualify for admission. Stiles Hall draws on its long history of successfully selecting, training, and motivating undergraduate student mentors to provide individual and consistent mentoring relationships for each focal student. It has been assisting low income, inner city youth to stay in school and excel for over sixty years by matching academically successful African American, Latino, Asian, and White UC Berkeley undergraduates -- many of whom are from similar inner city backgrounds as their mentees -- with urban elementary students. The Graduate School of Education is providing specific strategies for academic training of the mentors and academic support to the focal students and their teachers through its division of Language, Literacy, and Culture and through its Center for Urban Education.

In the first year of the collaboration, the focal students received two semesters of mentoring from 60 UCB students; paid literacy tutoring as one of four UCB America Reads pilot projects; weekend literacy workshops; attendance with their mentors at plays, sports events, and other field trips; ongoing support from the IHAD Project coordinator, Wanda Stewart, which included her coordination of a summer enrichment program.

A key change in the second year was to have weekly "Family Reading" along with Monday night meals at a neighborhood center, and eventually go provide pre-college advising through the Educational Guidance Center and pre-apprenticeships through local unions and small businesses while the students are in middle school.

RESULTS

The first outcome of sustaining academic and social support was completely achieved with 55 of the initial 60 students. Stiles Hall mentor coordinators recruited mentors who often had similar ethnic and socioeconomic backgrounds to the mentees with whom they were linked. They also coordinated transportation to the site and monitored time sheets for all the mentors that documented upwards of 100 hours of one-to-one contact with each mentee over the academic year.

Initial indications of ways that the mentees were improving through the project's academic and social interactions came from qualitative interview/survey reports completed with the 42 of the 55 mentors. On one key vector where mentors were asked to rate the impact they thought they were having on the mentee on a scale of 1 to 10 where 1 equaled "no impact" and 10 equaled "a change in life course" the average rating from the 42 mentors was 6 (See Chart 1). This clearly indicated that the mentors felt they were having very positive effects on their mentees.

A similar rating of the effect the mentors felt that the project was having on them personally with 1 equaling "none" and 10 equaling "a change in life course" resulted in an average rating of 8 (Chart 1). This score was a strong indication that our second outcome of at least 80% of the mentors experiencing personal and professional growth through community service was achieved. It is of interest that the perception of the mentors is that the project had greater impacts on them specifically than it had even on the mentees although their perceptions of mentee impacts were very high. Almost every comment about personal impacts from the 42 mentors surveyed could be characterized by the following statements from a few: "Mentoring pushes me to really open up my heart and become more aware that one person can significantly effect the life of another human being in a positive way if they are willing to extend themselves and try." "It's taught me a lot about how to interact with others." "It's made me more responsible." "Mentoring is teaching me a great deal about patience, creativity, and appreciation." "Mentoring has helped me to decide to teach when I get out of college."

The mentors were involved with their mentees in a variety of social interactions beyond the academic work with many reporting sharing activities like going to movies, lunches, college tours, book stores, museums, malls, and video arcades.

The third outcome was achieved with 21 of the students who were two or more grade levels behind fifth grade in reading being given substantial directed literacy instruction throughout the academic year by their mentors. These tutor/mentors were given specific training in literacy instruction, and they were paid for their tutoring work through the America Reads Program.

The fourth outcome was achieved principally through the institution of Family Literacy Nights. Mrs. Patricia Wright, the grandmother of one of the focal students, took primary responsibility for coordinating the Family Literacy Nights which occurred every other Monday evening during the school year. An average of 15 parents and 25 children in our project would take part in these family reading activities and social dinners at the Prescott Neighborhood Resource Center near which was across the street from the school. In addition to reinforcing the students' reading and making it a fun, family activity, this part of the project also was used to facilitate homework completion and the general improvement in students' attitudes toward and behavior in school.

The fifth outcome which was based on the other four was that well above our targeted goal of 50% of our focal students significantly improved their grades and competency in reading -- specifically in vocabulary development and in reading comprehension as measured by standardized tests. An unexpected outcome was that there was also significant improvement in composition as well as in math for these students during this academic year.

DISCUSSION

The initial baseline data that this project sought to improve at the site was the Terra Nova test results of the Spring 1997 testing of the focal students. In addition to collecting the 1997 Terra nova test results, the 1996-97 bar graph format report cards plus the letter grade format report cards from the 1997-98 academic year were collected.

The use of these artifacts to provide baseline data revealed several significant problems. First, the school and the district employ a different format for the third grade report cards than they do for the fourth grade report cards. Although we collected copies of both report cards for the focal students, the complicated methods of reporting data on student development was not comparable across the two instruments. We found that by and large, the teachers themselves did not understand (or had vastly different interpretations) of both what was being requested on their students and what it actually meant. So, a key piece of baseline data was the QRI scores that we got at the end of the first year of the project and that we reported on in last year's final report.

Now we have shifted our baseline to the Sat 9 tests administered at the end of the 1997-98 academic year. These test scores are compared with the Sat 9 scores of the 1998-99 academic year to measure student gains in the second year of the project.

The Chart 2 shows the baseline data from the 1998 SAT 9 Test and allows comparisons of the students' scores from the 1999 SAT 9 Test in the areas of reading comprehension, vocabulary, comprehension, and math. These comparisons show major increases in the skills that were tested for the vast majority of students served by the intervention. Baseline data for our next year of the project will include the current year's SAT 9 scores in conjunction with the earlier measures in order to be able to trace the focal students overall growth during the entire intervention. Next years benchmarks will be centered around this year's SAT 9s, and our goals for next year will be to show a similar increase to this year since many students are still below the 50th percentile this year despite a dramatic increase over the previous year.

The Chart 3 summarizes the average percentages of increase in skill development for all of the 55 students served by the project in the categories of reading, vocabulary, comprehension, and math. Comparison scores that reflected a "1" on either the 1998 or the 1999 test were not used in the averages because they would inflate the average scores for the other students. In the entire SAT 9 report for all skills, there were only a few scores like these. Also when data were not available on a student for a particular test then that test was not used in the averages.

With these caveats in place, Chart 3 shows that on average, reading scores increased 69% on the percentile ranking for our focal students. Vocabulary scores increased 82% on the percentile ranking. Comprehension scores increased 33%; and, math scores increased 62%. These are clearly dramatic increases in our focal students' skill development. What they represent are significant increases in these students' positions in the national percentile rankings of these academic skills. For example, the average percentile in reading for all of our focal students in 1998 was 28.58. In 1999 it had increased to 40.47 - a 12 point jump that makes them significantly closer to the 50th percentile. This increase is even more dramatic in the context of the 2 point average increase in reading reported by the OUSD's Testing Office for fifth graders in the whole school district based on the same SAT 9 tests.

BEST NEXT STEPS

Our next best steps are to provide better literacy training and support to our college student mentors. We propose to do this by creating a 3 hour course for each mentor to be enrolled in starting in the fall semester of 2000. This course which will be taught by Professor Mahiri with support from graduate students in the division of Language, Literacy, and Culture in the School of Education will focus on providing a higher level of conceptual understanding along with higher levels of practical application skills in literacy instruction for the college student mentors. It will also train them in more sophisticated data collection techniques, so that they will have a better understanding of qualitative ways to document their interactions with their mentees.

REFERENCES

Head, F., Reiman, A., & Thies-Ssprinthall, L. (1992). The reality of mentoring: Complexity in its process and function. In T. Bey & C.T. Holmes (Eds.), Mentoring: Contemporary principles and issues (pp. 5-24). Reston, VA: Association of Teacher Educators.

John-Steiner, V. (1996, February). Creativity and collaboration in knowledge construction. Paper presented at the Vygotsky Centennial Conference of the Assembly on Research, National Council of Teachers of English, Chicago, IL.

Vygotsky, L. (1978). Mind and society. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.