We find that mentors do become role models for the high school students. During the mentoring sessions, mentors talk with their mentees about family, school work and environment, interpersonal relationships, as well as the students' emotional state. Mentors explore the students' state of mind by talking about upcoming academic and extracurricular events, the students' overall academic performance, and personal issues. Mentors meet with their mentees once a week for an hour and keep detailed notes of their mentoring sessions. During the semester following students' participation in the project, they often visit the lab and are encouraged to continue to work with mentors to develop academic skills and to begin or complete the search for colleges.
Some students develop close relationships with their mentors.
The STAT has three subtests that assess analytic, creative, and practical thinking skills. We found that the average STAT multiple-choice subscores for our sample of 54 students to date were moderately high. 8.6 for the creative and 8.1 for the practical subscore for these students. While the Sternberg sample scores consistently higher than the TTP sample, both samples score highest on the creative and lowest on analytic subscales. The TTP sample scores equally low on the practical subsample, but the Sternberg sample scores for the practical and creative subtests are very similar.