The Right Way to Help

In a recent episode of Freakonomics Radio, one of my favorite podcasts, host Steven Dubner discussed the the findings of a study about mentoring called the Cambridge-Somerville Youth Study. The study separated over 500 boys between the ages of 5 and 13 into a treatment group and a control group. Each boy in the treatment group was paired with a counselor/mentor and received academic tutoring, counseling services, involvement in community programs like YMCA and Boy Scouts, among other things. The boys in the control group received no services but checked in regularly for an update. The initial results were collected and a ten-year follow-up was conducted. More information was collected by researcher Joan McCord thirty years later. McCord was able to track down about 95% of the original participants and combed through records documenting the outcomes of the boys' lives. What had been the effect of mentoring to these men?

Nothing.

Actually, let me quote Dr. McCord:

"The program had no impacts on juvenile arrest rates measured by official or unofficial records. The program also had no impacts on adult arrest rates. There were no differences between the two groups in the number of serious crimes committed, age at when a first crime was committed, age when first committing a serious crime, or age after no serious crime was committed. A larger proportion of criminals from the treatment group went on to commit additional crimes than their counterparts in the control group."

I'll bet that many of you as you read the first paragraph were almost bored because you, like me, already intuitively knew the results of such a mentoring program were positive. The only question was, "How awesome was it?" The results of the follow-up study startled McCord, prompting her to try to create hypotheses for why the experiment had failed. Among her conclusions, one really stood out to me.

The boys became too dependent on their mentors.

Once the support of these mentors was gone, the boys behavior reverted back to what it had been before the intervention...or worse.This should be a great caveat to those of us in the people business, and especially those of us who work with children.

Not all help is helpful.

No doubt about it: those of us who have chosen a career in public education care deeply about kids. Most of us would go to very great lengths to ensure kids "succeed". But it's easy for us sometimes to forget how success is defined. Often we myopically focus on this assignment or this grade and we give kids lots of "help" to get the work done, so they get the grade, so they pass. What we don't realize is that we may be creating dependents.

John Hattie's landmark synthesis of education research indicates that there are many strategies we can use to ensure a "mentoring" relationship has a big impact on student achievement. Among them are Teacher-Student Relationships, Study Skills, Peer Tutoring, Self-Questioning, and Meta-cognitive Strategies (if you want these explained, you'll have to read the books). The ultimate goal of a mentoring-type relationship (or, honestly, all teacher-student relationships) should be to develop what Hattie calls "Assessment-Capable Learners" - students who take charge of their own learning. 


While assignments and grades and test scores are important, we can't let them steer the ship. Let's remember what the ultimate goal of education really is: to develop people.