Pathways to Biomedical Careers: Enhancing the High School Experience

描述（由申请人提供）：本研究项目旨在扩展和评估大学雄心计划（CAP, www.collegeambiton.org），这是一个为低收入和少数民族学生上大学并追求科学，技术，工程和数学，包括生物医学的职业提供资源和支持的整个学校设计。CAP是基于对1000多名青少年从中学到成年的15年的实证研究，一项为期四年的随机临床试验，以及对大学入学决定因素的现有文献的回顾。CAP正在四所治疗高中（两所城市高中和两所农村高中）和四所匹配的比较学校实施，未来干预将包括16所治疗学校和16所对照学校，针对10,000多名高中生。所有学校的大学入学率都低于全州平均水平，也低于其他学校在种族和民族、社会经济地位和相似地理区域等方面的学生人数。CAP可以最好地描述为前测、后测、准实验、比较组设计。本研究计划的主要目标是评估CAP对两年制和四年制大学学生高等教育出修率的影响，并检验CAP对学生(1)高等教育选择（基于巴伦机构选择指数）和(2)在大学追求生物医学职业的影响。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): This research project aims to extend and evaluate the College Ambition Program (CAP, www.collegeambiton.org), a whole school design that provides resources and support to low-income and minority students to attend college and pursue careers in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, including biomedicine. CAP is based on fifteen years of empirical work that followed over 1,000 adolescents from middle school into adulthood, a four-year random clinical trial, and reviews of the extant literature on determinants of college enrollment. CAP is being implemented in four treatment high schools (two urban and two rural) and four matched comparison schools, in the future the intervention will include 16 treatment and 16 control schools targeting over 10,000 high school students. All schools have lower than average college enrollments rates when compared with the state average and with other schools with similar student populations on measures of race and ethnicity, socioeconomic status, and in similar geographic regions. CAP can best be described as a pretest, posttest, quasi-experimental, comparison-group design. The primary goal of this research proposal is to evaluate the efficacy of CAP on student postsecondary attendance at two-year and four-year institutions and to examine the effects of CAP on students (1) postsecondary educational choices (based on Barron's Index of institutional selectivity) and (2) pursuit of a biomedical career in college.