“Yes, I Can”: Testing an Intervention to Increase Middle School Students’ College and Career Self-Efficacy

Diversifying the genomic data science research community

Over the past 20 years, the explosion of genomic data collection and the cloud computing revolution have made computational and data science research accessible to anyone with a web browser and an internet connection. However, students at institutions with limited resources have received relatively little exposure to curricula or professional development opportunities that lead to careers in genomic data science. To broaden participation in genomics research, the scientific community needs to support these programs in local education and research at underserved institutions (UIs). These include community colleges, historically Black colleges and universities, Hispanic-serving institutions, and tribal colleges and universities that support ethnically, racially, and socioeconomically underrepresented students in the United States. We have formed the Genomic Data Science Community Network to support students, faculty, and their networks to identify opportunities and broaden access to genomic data science. These opportunities include expanding access to infrastructure and data, providing UI faculty development opportunities, strengthening collaborations among faculty, recognizing UI teaching and research excellence, fostering student awareness, developing modular and open-source resources, expanding course-based undergraduate research experiences (CUREs), building curriculum, supporting student professional development and research, and removing financial barriers through funding programs and collaborator support.

Development and Validation of a Short Form of the College-Going Self-Efficacy Scale

Social Cognitive Career Theory (Lent et al., 1994) is a useful framework for understanding educational attainment and reducing educational inequities. A key construct for middle and high school students is college-going self-efficacy. The College-Going Self-Efficacy Scale (CGSES; Gibbons & Borders, 2010a) has been used to measure secondary students' confidence in their abilities to attend and persist in post-secondary education, but with 30-items, it may be too lengthy for use with other measures in SCCT-grounded research in school settings. Using two independent samples of rural Appalachian high school students, we develop and validate the College-Going Self-Efficacy Scale-Short Form (CGSES-SF). This 14-item measure retains the full breadth of content from the original CGSES, demonstrates measurement equivalence across gender and prospective college generation status, and demonstrates good reliability and validity in these samples. Suggestions for future use of the CGSES-SF are provided.