Pathways to Biomedical Careers: Enhancing the High School Experience

该研究项目旨在扩展和评估大学雄心计划（CAP，www.collegeambiton.org），这是一个整体的学校设计，为低收入和少数民族学生提供资源和支持，让他们能够上大学，从事科学，技术，工程和数学（包括生物医学）的职业。CAP是基于15年的实证研究，跟踪了1,000多名从中学到成年的青少年，一项为期四年的随机临床试验，以及对有关大学入学决定因素的现有文献的回顾。目前正在四所治疗高中（两所城市学校和两所农村学校）和四所匹配的对照学校实施CAP，今后干预措施将包括16所治疗学校和16所对照学校，目标是10 000多名高中生。所有学校的大学入学率低于平均水平时，与国家的平均水平，并与其他学校有类似的学生人口的种族和民族的措施，社会经济地位，并在类似的地理区域。CAP可以被描述为一个前测，后测，准实验，比较组设计。本研究建议的主要目标是评估CAP对学生在两年制和四年制院校的中学后出勤率的有效性，并检查CAP对学生的影响（1）中学后教育选择（基于巴伦的机构选择性指数）和（2）在大学追求生物医学职业。

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.