PROVO — Each week, Spanish Fork High schoolteacher Denise Daniels meets with students after school to mentor them in math.

"For a lot of kids, they need that extra one-on-one help," she said. "We're trying to fill in the gaps with kids that aren't getting it completely in their minds during class."

She's seen tremendous results in the classroom, but a healthy teacher-student mentoring relationship can actually help increase a student's chances of going to college as well, according to a new BYU study.

"Having a mentor was good across the board, but having a teacher mentor was the best," said Lance Erickson, a BYU sociology professor and lead author. "And if you were a disadvantaged kid, you received a greater benefit from the teacher (mentor)."

The study, which was published last week in the Sociology of Education journal, found that students who had an adult mentor had a 50 percent greater chance of going to college. However, for disadvantaged students who were mentored by a teacher, not just an adult, their odds of attending college nearly doubled, from 35 to 65 percent.

Teachers as mentors are especially effective because they understand the educational system and its requirements, Erickson said." The disadvantaged kids are less likely to have someone in their family network who would know how to go to college, or how to write an essay, or whether (college is) even possible," Erickson said.

The study's co-author is Steve McDonald, a sociologist at North Carolina State University. Glen Elder Jr. of University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill also contributed to the paper.

The study, which relied on data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health and its survey of more than 14,000 adolescents from 7th to 12th grades and their parents, also found that "disadvantaged youth are least likely to have teacher mentors, but they are the most likely to benefit from them."

Erickson said this should encourage adults to "put our money where our mouth is," and support teachers while reaching out to those youths who need the most help.

"We should recognize the important influence that teachers have," he said. "Not just in the formal ways of teaching and giving instruction, but the less formal things that teachers do. These may be the things they aren't really getting paid to do. They're going above the call of duty to some extent in providing this kind of help."

Just ask Linda Bryant.

She watches teachers work tirelessly to help students prepare for college through the Advancement Via Individual Determination program in the Granite School District.