<p> The purpose of the study was to determine the impact that community-based group mentoring had on improving academic efficacy and personal efficacy of 31 African American male participants. The study measured the influence of the group-mentoring program, which was arranged around an attribution-retraining curriculum. Participants attended a summer academy where they were exposed to a series of attribution retraining seminars allowing them to engage in activities making connections to attribution retraining concepts. The study aimed to determine if the participant's perceptions about their intelligence would be positively influenced by the attribution-retraining curriculum administered over a course of the 2-week summer academy. Survey responses from a pretest and posttest as related to motivational dimensions of attribution were analyzed. The quantitative results revealed a marginally significant change noted by <i>t</i>(29) = 1.82, <i>p</i> = 0.080, (.05 = statistically significant) for the two-tailed t-test reflecting that the participants' perceptions changed slightly regarding their ability to grow their intelligence. A correlational exploration was also conducted, which revealed that the group mentoring seminars influenced the participants' motivation to make better choices and to feel better about their ability to control their academic and personal destiny. Implications of the study include establishing attribution-retraining curriculum as part of group mentoring models in nonprofit organizations. Also, using attribution-retraining curricula with African American males as a motivational concept for academic and personal success was determined a worthwhile endeavor to mitigate the challenges African American male adolescents face including broken family structure, poverty, poor academic performance, high dropout rates, and behavioral challenges. </p>
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:PROQUEST/oai:pqdtoai.proquest.com:3682251 |
| Date | 24 February 2015 |
| Creators | Robert, Lance A. |
| Publisher | Capella University |
| Source Sets | ProQuest.com |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | thesis |
Page generated in 0.002 seconds