Child mentors' perception on development in primary school peer mentoring programme of underprivileged context

Abstract

Despite being a metropolitan city and Asian financial hub, Hong Kong has the widest income inequality among all developed economies. Students in the lower social class were confined to limited learning resources, such as access to quality school utilities and monetary-based learning programmes. Hence, peer mentoring could serve as a form of low-cost intervention implemented in schools in underprivileged district to provide learning opportunities for students beyond regular school lessons.

This dissertation aims to explore and fill the literature gap of an unexplored field on how child mentors perceive their development in a peer-mentoring programme, in an underprivileged context of Hong Kong. Therefore, this study was conducted at a Hong Kong primary school, from a lower-socioeconmomic district. 15 mentors and 15 mentees were selected from the same school, and were invited to participate in a peer reading programme, over the course of 6 weeks, in a total of 12 sessions. Both qualitative and quantitative data were collected from the mentors. The qualitative instrument collected pre-mentoring and post-mentoring findings, while the quantitative instrument collected on-going data over the 6-week programme. The findings revealed that these child mentors have perceived overall positive development. Connectedness between the mentors and mentees were found to be the crucial component contributing to the development of mentors. Durational factors such as prolonged isolation were sighted as detrimental factors to mentors’ development.