he UT Southwestern Scholars Program in Organic Chemistry (SPOC) is a 10-week summer enrichment program for underrepresented minority* or disadvantaged** students which will be conducted from May 31, 2010 (Monday) through August 5, 2010 (Thursday).
Review: SPOC Program Outline.
The goals of the program are to improve college students’ performance in organic chemistry and to provide these students with exposure to clinical medicine. The SPOC program will be conducted on the UT Southwestern campus in Dallas and has two components: 1) a 10 week course in Organic Chemistry and 2) clinical preceptorships with practicing physicians at UT Southwestern or in one of our affiliated clinical sites.
Organic Chemistry Instruction: This program component is designed to facilitate students’ understanding of basic concepts of organic chemistry and improve their knowledge and test performance in organic chemistry. This course will be taught by doctoral students in the Biochemistry department at UT Southwestern for 10 weeks. As part of this program, we will implement a novel experimental method of teaching organic chemistry with gaming technology. Specifically, we will compare the effectiveness of teaching organic chemistry using gaming technology to standard methods of teaching organic chemistry in a group of disadvantaged/minority undergraduate students. This component of our program will be designed as a randomized, prospective, controlled study. We will select twenty-eighty students through a competitive process for this program.
By random assignment, fourteen of the students, in addition to a ten-week traditional classroom course in organic chemistry, will be administered a computer game which provides 3-dimensional, dynamic chemical structure visualization and synthesis to supplement their learning. The other group of fourteen students will receive the identical ten-week classroom instruction supplemented with traditional written, non-dynamic, two-dimensional exercises of chemical structures and synthesis. At the beginning and end of the 10-week program, students will be administered standardized Medical College Admissions Tests (MCAT) type questions in organic chemistry and aptitude tests of abstract reasoning and spatial visualization.
Clinical Preceptorship: This program component will provide students who have an interest in health care with a clinical shadowing experience with a practicing physician. We will pair each of the twenty-eight students with physician mentors who are in clinical practice at UT Southwestern or at one of its clinical affiliated hospitals, clinics or private practices. We anticipate that the impact of this exposure will assist students in defining their career goals in medicine.
* Underrepresented minority students are defined as designated by the American Association of Medical Colleges as being underrepresented in medicine as compared to their proportion representation in the general population (African-American, Hispanic, Mainland Puerto Rican, Native American [American Indian, Native Alaskan and Native Hawaiian]).
** Disadvantaged students are defined as designated by the Texas Joint Admissions Medical Program as financially eligible for a Pell grant and/or an Estimated Family Contribution (EFC) of up to $8000 unless other evidence of economic disadvantaged status exists.
