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Purposes： This study was to examine the effects of empowerment education programs on empowerment and mental health in high school students. Methods： This study involved a nonequivalent control group pre-test and post-test design. The subjects for this study consisted of 421 high school students who attended two general high schools in Busan. The 211 students in the experimental group received empowerment education training, while the 210 students in the control group did not. The data were collected from March 2, 2004 to July 20, 2004. The empowerment education program consisted of 17 separate 50-minute sessions. The questionnire was developedby authors and revised it based on experts' advice. SPSS 11.0 program was used to analyze the data. Chi-square test and t-test were used to test the homogeneity of general characteristics and dependent variables. Student's t-test was used to evaluate the differences between the experimental group and control group after the treatment. Results： Just as we hypothesized, the experimental group exhibited higher empowerment scores than the control group. For subcategory, Score of self-efficacy and self-esteem increased significantly in the experimental group compared to the control group. However, the score of decision-making ability did not increase significantly. The data failed to support our second hypothesis that the experimental group would have higher mental health scores than the control group. Although the score of self-scale increased significantly in the experimental group compared to the control group, the score of social-support and psychopathology did not. Conclusions： Empowerment education programs are effective for empowerment of high school students. However, such training is effective only for promoting the self scale but not overall mental health. Thus, we suggest the application of the empowerment education program to make high school students aware of their abilities. Furthermore, we suggest the implementation of mental health programs to supplement such empowerment education programs.