A Controlled Evaluation of a High School Biomedical Pipeline Program: Design and Methods

Given limited funding for school-based science education, non-school-based programs have been developed at colleges and universities to increase the number of students entering science- and health-related careers and address critical workforce needs. However, few evaluations of such programs have been conducted. We report the design and methods of a controlled trial to evaluate the Stanford Medical Youth Science Program’s Summer Residential Program (SRP), a 25-year-old university-based biomedical pipeline program. This 5-year matched cohort study uses an annual survey to assess educational and career outcomes among four cohorts of students who participate in the SRP and a matched comparison group of applicants who were not chosen to participate in the SRP. Matching on sociodemographic and academic background allows control for potential confounding. This design enables the testing of whether the SRP has an independent effect on educational- and career-related outcomes above and beyond the effects of other factors such as gender, ethnicity, socioeconomic background, and pre-intervention academic preparation. The results will help determine which curriculum components contribute most to successful outcomes and which students benefit most. After 4 years of follow-up, the results demonstrate high response rates from SRP participants and the comparison group with completion rates near 90 %, similar response rates by gender and ethnicity, and little attrition with each additional year of follow-up. This design and methods can potentially be replicated to evaluate and improve other biomedical pipeline programs, which are increasingly important for equipping more students for science- and health-related careers.     

Audience support and choking under pressure: a home disadvantage?

This paper highlights the not-so-obvious but compelling reasons why the same supportive audiences that can help performers attain their highest potential also may increase performers' risk of choking under pressure. Drawing primarily from social psychology research and theory, we conclude that audience support magnifies performance pressure and induces performers to avoid failure rather than seek success during the most critical moments of performance contests. Although supportive audiences can inspire performers to excel when motivation would otherwise be lacking, audiences may also lead performers towards maladaptive self-monitoring and overcautiousness when the stakes are highest. The increased self-focus that supportive audiences induce can disrupt the automatic execution of the skills performers possess. Dispositional and situational moderators of the relationship between audience support and performance are reviewed.     

Untangling the Links among Athletic Involvement, Gender, Race, and Adolescent Academic Outcomes

Although previous research has established that high school sports participation may be associated with positive academic outcomes, the parameters of the relationship remain unclear. Using a longitudinal sample of nearly 600 Western New York adolescents, this study examined gender- and race-specific differences in the impact of two dimensions of adolescent athletic involvement ("jock" identity and athlete status) on changes in school grades and school misconduct over a two-year interval. Female and black adolescents who identified themselves as "jocks" reported lower grades than those who did not, whereas female athletes reported higher grades than female nonathletes. Jocks also reported significantly more misconduct (including skipping school, cutting classes, having someone from home called to the school for disciplinary purposes, and being sent to the principal's office) than nonjocks. Gender moderated the relationship between athlete status and school misconduct; athletic participation had a less salutary effect on misconduct for girls than for boys.     

A secure base in adolescence: markers of attachment security in the mother-adolescent relationship

This study sought to identify ways in which adolescent attachment security, as assessed via the Adult Attachment Interview, is manifest in qualities of the secure base provided by the mother-adolescent relationship. Assessments included data coded from mother-adolescent interactions, test-based data, and adolescent self-reports obtained from an ethnically and socioeconomically diverse sample of moderately at-risk 9th and 10th graders. This study found several robust markers of adolescent attachment security in the mother-adolescent relationship. Each of these markers was found to contribute unique variance to explaining adolescent security, and in combination, they accounted for as much as 40% of the raw variance in adolescent security. These findings suggest that security is closely connected to the workings of the mother-adolescent relationship via a secure-base phenomenon, in which the teen can explore independence in thought and speech from the secure base of a maternal relationship characterized by maternal attunement to the adolescent and maternal supportiveness.     

Using Stated-Preference Questions to Investigate Variations in Willingness to Pay for Preserving Marble Monuments: Classic Heterogeneity, Random Parameters, and Mixture Models

This paper investigates heterogeneity in the preferences/WTP (willingness to pay) to preserve marble monuments in Washington, D.C. This is done in the context of three different discrete-choice random-utility models. The main focus is to estimate a mixture model of choices over preservation programs. This model captures the best features of random-parameters models and models that assume preference parameters are deterministic functions of observable characteristics of the individual. The mixture model, and it alone, predicts that increased preservation is a bad for a significant proportion of young, non-Caucasians. That some proportion of the population might consider preservation a bad is a contingency that should be planned for in efforts to value cultural resources. Data and computer code are available athttp://www.colorado.edu/economics/morey/dataset.html.     

Male vulnerability to reading disability is not likely to be a myth: a call for new data

Whether boys are more vulnerable than girls to reading disabilities (RD) is controversial. We review studies that were designed to minimize ascertainment bias in the selection of individuals with RD. These include population-based studies that identified children with RD by objective, unbiased methods and studies that examined the gender ratios among the affected relatives of those diagnosed with RD. We conclude that even when ascertainment biases are minimized, there is still a significant preponderance of boys with RD, although the gender ratio of the affected relatives of those with RD manifests the weakest male bias. Furthermore, we demonstrate that potentially confounding factors such as attentional or neurological problems, race, IQ, and severity of RD cannot account for the observed gender bias. We end with a clarion call to future researchers to (a) consider analyzing gender differences by means of more than one definition of RD, (b) compare gender ratios when boys and girls are ranked against the performance of their own gender as opposed to an average across genders, and (c) report group differences in variability and effect sizes of obtained gender ratios.