This toolkit is intended to be used within the context of a well-designed evaluation plan and can also help mentoring programs to improve effectiveness in measuring outcomes; its goal is to provide well-tested recommendations for instruments that can be used by mentoring programs and their evaluators in order to assess programs’ impacts.
This toolkit was developed by the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP) National Mentoring Resource Center (NMRC). The toolkit’s goal is to provide well-tested recommendations for mentoring programs and their evaluators to accurately capture their impacts and, as a result, set the stage for improvements in program quality over time and generate a stronger and more targeted argument for programs that show potential for increased effectiveness. Another goal of the toolkit is to increase consistency in how youth outcomes are measured across programs. The toolkit provides key evaluation considerations and advice for designing and administering evaluation tools and is built around six domains of youth outcomes that the NMRC Research Board has identified as the most common areas for mentoring programs to have an impact: mental and emotional health; social emotional skills; healthy and pro-social behavior; problem behavior; interpersonal relationships; and academics. The toolkit also includes recommendations for assessing different types of risk and protective factors, and a section featuring tips for administering instruments as well as advice for incorporating the recommended measures effectively into broader evaluation designs.