Claus-Christian Carbon

Universities frequently offer support programs to assist first-year students with the transition from school to the university. The purpose of this study was to examine the effects of different mentoring styles on mentee academic performance after 1 year and 2 years of study. Participants consisted of 417 psychology students who started their course of study in the 2007/2008 winter term at the University of Vienna. Three hundred twenty-eight students participated voluntarily in the peer mentoring program, Cascaded Blended Mentoring, in which they were supported by 48 peer mentors (advanced students) in small groups. Eighty-nine students did not participate in the mentoring program. The mentoring groups were classified according to one of three mentoring styles described by Leidenfrost, Strassnig, Schabmann, Carbon, and Spiel (2011): (b) motivating master mentoring, (b) informatory standard mentoring, and (c) negative minimalist mentoring. Our data suggest that participants in the mentoring program performed better in their studies than students who did not participate in terms of average grade and number of courses passed. There was, however, no specific impact of the different mentoring styles on mentee academic performance. The transition from school to university is a challenging life situation for young adults, as i