Impact of the mentoring relationship on the development of talented students – a narrative review

Abstract

In order to provide quality instruction for students, to cultivate free and entrepreneurial spirits, the educational system needs teachers capable of acting as mentors for their students; inspiring them, teaching them about moral values and helping them develop their cognitive and career-orientation skills. Through the impact that it has on the development of students in general and on the talented students in particular, mentoring is one of the most appropriate strategies for achieving this goal. This article is a narrative review of the studies identified in the literature that describe a series of mentoring programs especially designed for talented students, which have contributed to their development on the psychosocial and cognitive level, as well as on career orientation. Complete research articles related to mentoring programs for talented students were gathered from online database searches and needed to meet several criteria: (1) the program evaluated needed to involve mentoring as the practice has been defined like an ”ideal type” of mentoring in the literature (Grassinger, Porath, & Ziegler, 2010); (2) the study had to examine the impact of involvement in a mentoring program on the development of talented students on several levels: psychosocial, cognitive, career support; and (3) the sample used in the evaluation of the program needed to include the talented students that are more predisposed to benefit from a mentoring program: talented primary, gymnasium and high school students and twice-exceptional students (Goff & Torrance, 1999; Subotnik, Olszewski‐Kubilius, Khalid, & Finster, 2021). The results of this review underline the impact of the talented students’ involvement in a mentoring relationship on their development and the necessity for this type of programs to be sustained in an educational context, not only at an informal level but also through formal programs specifically designed and implemented for this purpose. The paper concludes by presenting a series of recommendations on how such programs can be effectively implemented at the educational institutions level.

Keywords

• mentoring
• development
• talented students