Enrollment Management in Undergraduate Medical School Admissions: A Complementary Framework to Holistic Review for Increasing Diversity in Medicine.

Medical schools implemented holistic review more than a decade ago, which led to more deliberate consideration and inclusion of applicants historically underrepresented in medicine. This article presents a theory of holistic enrollment management that unites holistic review with enrollment management principles. This theory contextualizes medical school admissions as a complex marketplace with multifaceted, competing forces. Applying an enrollment management framework of mission, market, means, and metrics can improve the capacity of a medical school to efficiently advance its mission over time. Medical schools employing a clear, compelling, and focused mission to direct all aspects of the medical education enterprise can more effectively attract applicants who are better prepared to enact that mission throughout their careers. Medical schools share a marketplace and collectively compete to identify, attract, admit, and matriculate the most mission-aligned student body within the pool of applicants they share. Institutions that deliberately mobilize resources within this dynamic marketplace will engage, admit, and matriculate the most suiting applicants and attract even more mission-aligned matriculants over time. Widespread adoption of this holistic framework of enrollment management may enhance the capacity of the medical education system to better capitalize on the existing diversity in the national pool of applicants, encourage more underrepresented applicants to apply in the future, admit and matriculate a more diverse national student body, and ultimately better prepare new physicians to meet the increasingly diverse health care needs of the nation.

Career Preparedness and School Achievement of Portuguese Children: Longitudinal Trend Articulations.

Social Cognitive Career Theory suggests that students' preparedness for the school-to-work transition is a developmental process. Middle school children explore various careers, obtain feedback about their academic progress, and develop career self-efficacy and outcome expectations. These processes advance provisional educational/occupational goals. The literature has suggested articulations between career and academic development and how both vary across demographic characteristics, but longitudinal studies linking these processes are scarce. This study tested articulations between career preparedness and academic achievement during middle school years and employed gender and geographical location as potential moderators affecting the linkage between career and school domains. Participants included 429 children (47.8% girls) from northern (69.5%) and central Portugal (30.5%) followed across four occasions of measurement (MageWave1 = 10.23, SD = 0.50). Data was collected with school records, the Multidimensional Scales of Perceived Self-Efficacy, Career Exploratory Outcome Expectations Scale, Childhood Career Exploration Inventory and Childhood Career Development Scale. Average and orthnormalized linear, quadratic and cubic trends were computed. Pearson correlation coefficients suggested positive and statistically significant associations between career exploratory outcome expectations and academic achievement average trends. Career planning and self-efficacy expectations were negatively associated with academic achievement quadratic trends. Multiple linear regression models suggested that career exploratory outcome expectations and career planning were respectively statistically significant predictors of the average and quadratic trends of academic achievement. Gender moderated the association between the career variables and academic achievement linear trends as well as the relation of career planning and self-efficacy with academic achievement cubic trends. Additionally, the geographical location moderated the association between the average trend of career exploratory outcome expectations and academic achievement as well as tended to moderate the relation between the career variables and academic achievement quadratic trends. Future research could seek to explore the role of context in shaping the trajectories and linkages between career and academic progress with a more representative sample of participants from a broader array of geographical locations. This study advances extant literature by affirming the longitudinal relationship between the school and work domains in youth, which might sustain practices aimed at fostering students' career preparedness and academic achievement.

Examining tenets of personal growth initiative using the personal growth initiative scale-II.

One promising antecedent of optimal functioning is personal growth initiative (PGI), which is the active and intentional desire to grow as a person. PGI theory and its measure, the Personal Growth Initiative Scale, have consistently shown positive relations with optimal functioning and growth. Recently, the PGI theory and its measure have been revised to account for theoretical advances. Consequently, testing of the revised theory and measure is needed to assess their capacity to predict psychological functioning and growth. The current study examined 2 tenets of PGI theory in a sample of college students. Results indicated that 3 of the 4 factors of PGI were positively related to psychological well-being and negatively related to aspects of psychological distress. In addition, the same 3 factors were related to growth in a salient domain (vocational identity development) and explained variance beyond that accounted for by more stable personality traits.

Mindfulness as a predictor of positive reappraisal and burnout in standardized patients.

BACKGROUND: Standardized patients (SPs) portray emotionally intense roles that can have unintended deleterious effects including burnout. PURPOSE: This study explored SP characteristics that could serve as protective factors against these adverse effects. The literature suggests that positive reappraisal and mindfulness are protective factors, with positive reappraisal mediating the relationship between mindfulness and burnout. METHODS: Seventy-six SPs completed an instrument measuring burnout, positive reappraisal, and mindfulness. Multiple regression was performed to test the hypothesized mediator model. RESULTS: The results revealed that mindfulness and positive reappraisal explained a meaningful portion of SP burnout variance (R (2) = .31 p < .01). Germane to the mediator model, all correlations were significant: mindfulness and positive reappraisal (a) r = .668; positive reappraisal and burnout (b) r = -.527; and mindfulness and burnout (c) r = -.496, p < 01. When positive reappraisal and mindfulness were included in the model, the previously significant relationship c was no longer statistically significant. The combination of these three relationships supports a mediator model. CONCLUSIONS: Education to enhance mindfulness and positive reappraisal offers a way to offset the adverse effects of portraying intense emotional patient experiences.

Career development during childhood and adolescence.

Identity development is central to the career development of children and adolescents. This article reviews the literature pertaining to identity development as being composed of career exploration, commitment, and reconsideration and offers some implications for career interventions.

A multi-dimensional measure of vocational identity status.

Establishing a worker identity is among the most central aspects of the transition from adolescence to adulthood. Despite its importance, few measures with acceptable psychometric and conceptual characteristics exist to assess vocational identity statuses. This study reports the development and evaluation of the Vocational Identity Status Assessment (VISA), which is derived from established conceptual models and includes career exploration, commitment, and reconsideration dimensions. Results show that the VISA exhibited metric invariance across a high school and university sample. Cluster analyses demonstrated that the VISA consistently resolved six identity statuses across the two samples, supporting the previously established achieved, moratorium, foreclosed, and diffused statuses along with two additional statuses termed searching moratorium and undifferentiated. The identity statuses predicted differences in participants' work valences and well-being with the achieved and diffused statuses respectively exhibiting the most and least favorable characteristics. Implications, limitations, and suggestions for future research based upon these findings are offered.

Intrinsic Work Value-Reward Dissonance and Work Satisfaction during Young Adulthood.

Previous research suggests that discrepancies between work values and rewards are indicators of dissonance that induce change in both to reduce such dissonance over time. The present study elaborates this model to suggest parallels with the first phase of the extension- and-strain curve. Small discrepancies or small increases in extension are presumed to be almost unnoticeable, while increasingly large discrepancies are thought to yield exponentially increasing strain. Work satisfaction is a principal outcome of dissonance; hence, work value-reward discrepancies are predicted to diminish work satisfaction in an exponential fashion. Findings from the work and family literature, however, lead to the prediction that this curvilinear association will be moderated by gender and family roles. Using longitudinal data spanning the third decade of life, the results suggest that intrinsic work value-reward discrepancies, as predicted, are increasingly associated, in a negative curvilinear fashion, with work satisfaction. This pattern, however, differs as a function of gender and family roles. Females who established family roles exhibited the expected pattern while other gender by family status groups did not. The results suggest that gender and family roles moderate the association between intrinsic work value-reward dissonance and satisfaction. In addition, women who remained unmarried and childless exhibited the strongest associations between occupational rewards and satisfaction.

Work values system development during adolescence.

Work values stability, change, and development can be appreciably reduced to a living system model (Ford, 1994). This theoretical model includes discrepancy-reducing and cohesion-amplifying mechanisms that interact to govern the change in standard- and goal-oriented work values over time (Boldero & Francis, 2002). Employing longitudinal data from a sample of adolescents (n = 1010) spanning the 9(th) through the 12(th) grades, the results demonstrate that the value system develops in a theoretically predictable fashion during the adolescent period. Discrepancy reduction and cohesion mechanisms interact to either maintain or increase the integrity of and harmony between standard-oriented values associated with high school part-time work experiences and goal-oriented work values related to anticipated career-oriented work during adulthood. Exploratory analyses suggest that adolescents' educational expectations influence the relative salience of standard- and goal-oriented work values and the discrepancy reduction process linking the two over time.