Benefits to Teen Mentors Involved in Programming for School 青少年导师参与规划学校的好处.doc

Teens as Teachers: Leadership Skills and Self Esteem Changes in Health Rocks! Teen Mentors/Teachers Michael E. Newman Susan L. Holder Rae Wilkinson Mississippi State University Abstract This evaluation focused on the changes in leadership skills and self-esteem of teen mentors involved in an Extension tobacco prevention program. In the program, teens served as mentors to elementary students (primarily grades 3 through 6) by presenting information and answering questions about making healthy decisions, with an emphasis on dangers of tobacco use. Although the elementary students were the focus of the project, project staff hypothesized that the teen mentors would also benefit from their experience as presenters and role models. This benefit should be seen in terms of the teens’ leadership skills and self-esteem. Teen mentors’ leadership skills and self-esteem were measured before and after the mentoring activity. The leadership skills instrument was developed as part of the revised version of the self-report Personal Skill Assessment Guide in the 4-H Curriculum, Leadership Skills You Never Outgrow, Book III and revised by Laurie Blackwell for a M.S. thesis at New Mexico State University in 1990. The mentors’ self-esteem was measured using the Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale (RSE) (Rosenberg, 1965). This Guttman scale inventory provides a global measure of self-esteem and has been shown to be valid and reliable. It is a short instrument that has been shown to be an adequate replacement for the Coopersmith Self-Esteem Inventory. Of the 278 teens that completed the pretest, 94 completed the posttest via U.S. Mail. A comparison of the respondents with the non-respondents in terms of pretest leadership skills, pretest self-esteem, age, and grade-level showed no difference between the two groups. Dependent t-test analyses showed that teens that participated in the project improved in both their leadership skills (p .05) and self-esteem (p .05). The investigators conclu