Educational Activities

The objective of the BRAINYAC program is to prepare high school students for, and deliver, the experience of working in a neuroscience research laboratory over a summer. Our program goals are to prepare local students from Upper Manhattan and the South Bronx with the skills necessary to enter a working research laboratory over a period of 8 months, and support them in learning key laboratory skills and communicating them to an audience.Our hypothesis is that students' self-reports of scientific effectiveness and science identity will improve over the course of the 8-month long program. Self-reported efficacy measures predict academic performance in science, so an improvement in these self-report measures may indicate a higher likelihood to succeed in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) studies or careers. Likewise, science identity has a positive impact on a student's likelihood of entering a science career, particularly in populations that are under-represented in science.Over a 4-year period we will track students' self-reports of (1) scientific efficacy, including their level of confidence in scientific writing, oral presentation, library and literature search, conducting research and general academic skills, and (2) science identity. We will adopt a mixed-methods approach combining survey data with focus groups and interviews to present a full picture of these changes. We also propose to track students after they leave the program, to measure whether the changes in scientific self-efficacy translate into STEM studies at the level of higher education or career choices. We will also obtain data from scientific mentors in the program to inform us whether we are adequately supporting them in providing the students with training.

Study objective: This study is planning to develop a new simulation-based ethics education model and evaluate the effectiveness of the model to develop medical students' knowledge, moral reasoning, communication skills, and problem-solving abilities. Several strategies will be conducted to achieve this goal, including faculty development, ethics courses development, and case scenario development. Methods: The transnational learning and workshops will be arranged for faculty to develop competence for simulation-based ethics education. The workshops will gather the interdisciplinary experts together to discuss and develop the core curriculum and case scenario. The students will be assigned randomly into the simulated clinical ethical situation with simulation patients for the intervention group, and into the workshop discussing clinical ethics case scenario for the control group. The instruments will be developed and the quantitative and qualitative analysis will be conducted.