Self-efficacy Toward a Healthcare Career Among Minority High School Students in a Surgical Pipeline Program: A Mixed Methods Study.

OBJECTIVE: While many barriers to healthcare careers exist for URM students, a strong sense of self-efficacy may help mitigate these obstacles. This study explores how URM high school students describe their academic challenges and compares their descriptions across self-efficacy scores. DESIGN: We conducted a convergent mixed methods study of URM high school students. Students completed a validated self-efficacy questionnaire and participated in semi-structured focus group interviews to discuss their approach to academic challenges, goal setting, and achievement. The primary outcome was academic, social, and emotional self-efficacy, measured using the Self-Efficacy Questionnaire for Children. We separated participants into high and low self-efficacy groups based on scores in each domain. Using thematic analysis, we identified and compared common themes associated with academic challenges and goal setting. SETTING: Surgical exposure pipeline program sponsored by Stanford University Department of Surgery PARTICIPANTS: Low-income, high academic achieving URM high school students interested in science, technology, engineering and mathematics, and/or healthcare careers. RESULTS: Thirty-one high school students completed the focus groups and self-efficacy questionnaire. Most students scored in the high self-efficacy group for at least one domain: 65% for academic self-efficacy, 56% for social self-efficacy, and 19% for emotional self-efficacy. Four emergent themes highlighted participants' perspectives toward educational success: fulfillment in academic challenges, focus on future goals, failing forward, and asking for help. Compared to students with low self-efficacy scores, students in the high-scoring self-efficacy groups more often discussed strategies and concrete behaviors such as the importance of seeking support from teachers and peers and learning from failure. CONCLUSIONS: Students in high self-efficacy groups were more comfortable utilizing approaches that helped them succeed academically. Additional efforts are needed to bolster student self-efficacy, particularly in students from URM backgrounds, to increase diversity in medical schools.

Promoting youth purpose: a review of the literature.

This article reviews the research literature on teaching and supporting purpose in adolescence and young adulthood. An extensive search revealed that most studies on youth purpose examine psychological correlates and neglect instructional and social supports. School is an effective context for fostering purpose, yet reported approaches for explicitly instructing for purpose are rare after the early 1990s, reflecting a trend away from a language of purpose as a discrete endeavor in education since at least the 1960s. Furthermore, research on the outcomes of early purpose instruction curricula is not present in empirical journal articles. Nevertheless, a concern for fostering youth purpose has not disappeared from education; rather, it is subsumed under approaches that foster more comprehensive positive student outcomes, such as character, civic engagement, and positive youth development. Key curricular approaches to these outcomes are therefore also reviewed and examined for insights into how purpose can be fostered.