| This quantitative study examines the effects of an Advisory Mentoring Program (AMP) on school climate, school connectedness, and academic achievement within one Southwestern urban high school district. The purpose of this research was primarily to explore the potentiality that mentoring programs may have to promote success in school and prevent student drop-outs. The high school utilizing the Advisory Mentoring Program (School A) was compared with a school with similar demographics (School B) that did not utilize the AMP. Both schools consisted of a majority of Hispanic students with similar ELL populations and approximately 90% students receiving free and reduced lunch.;The study involved a total of 214 junior students in the Southwest Urban School District, 74 from School A and 140 from School B, who responded to a voluntary Likert scale survey. The survey was designed to determine students' perceptions of school climate, school connectedness, and academic achievement. The data were collected in March of 2015 and were analyzed using ANOVA and MONCOVA analysis methods. These methods allowed the researcher to make comparisons between the means of the two schools and allowed for multi-variable testing.;After screening the data for outliers, nonlinearity, and other violations of normal distribution, the results showed a significant multivariate effect for all three school outcome variables with small to moderate effect size, depending on the variable. These results led the researcher to reject all three null hypotheses and conclude that the Advisory Mentoring Program had a positive effect on student perceptions of school climate, school connectedness, and academic achievement. The researcher also concluded that gender was significant for student perceptions of academic achievement, with mentored female students more likely to feel positively toward their academic success.;This study offers insights for both educational practitioners and researchers. First, mentoring programs offer administrative teams a way to address factors that may help prevent student drop-outs while providing an effective and viable way to meet students' personal and academic needs. Second, this study may guide the future research of scholars interested in how and in what ways mentoring programs can be used in order to positively impact student success. |
