Campus Location
Abilene Campus (Residential)
Date of Award
5-2022
Document Type
Thesis
Department
Social Work
Degree Name
Master of Science
Committee Chair or Primary Advisor
Kyeonghee Jang
Second Committee Member or Secondary Advisor
Rachel Slaymaker
Third Committee Member or Committee Reader
Sarah McLean
Abstract
Students who drop out of high school can cause a social problem for many high schools.They can become a social problem in that dropping out can lead to difficult life changes. Moreover, a student’s academic mindset is stated to be a major factor of dropout. As a result, in an attempt to prevent dropout a key component is to better the academic mindset. To improve the academic mindset there are many studies on mentoring to be a promising intervention. However, there is a lack of empirical study on its impact on the academic mindset. The purpose of this study is to explore how mentoring is related to the academic mindset among the study population of at-risk students at a Texas high school. A nonequivalent comparison group design was used, using a pre and posttest to compare the change between two groups of students at a high school in Texas. Data was reviewed for a total of 21 students who were enrolled in a dropout prevention program. Although mentoring had a significant effect, it did not necessarily buffer the results for the academic mindset. Surprisingly, there was a positive relationship in 2 out of 5 domains including the overall scores. The results show the effect of the mentor services on the outcomes was negative although statistically significant. These findings imply that the research is not conclusive. It is recommended that additional studies be completed to continue examining the impact that mentoring has on the academic mindset of at-risk youth. Further investigation is needed to validate these findings.
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.
Recommended Citation
Venegas, Brittany Nichole, "The Impact of Mentoring on the Academic Mindset of At-Risk High School Students in Texas" (2022). Digital Commons @ ACU, Electronic Theses and Dissertations. Paper 483.
https://digitalcommons.acu.edu/etd/483