📄 medicine

Dual-Impact Outcomes of a Summer Medical Pathway Program: Learner Empowerment and Student Educator Development

This exploratory mixed-methods study demonstrates that the IMPRESS summer pathway program successfully achieves a dual impact by significantly enhancing undergraduate learners' medical knowledge, self-efficacy, and sense of belonging while simultaneously fostering teaching, leadership, and communication skills in their medical student mentors.

Original authors: Xinyi Luo, James Pai, Hiyori Roberts, Jonathan Allotey, Joseph Ritondale, Kalli Segel, Vivien Okechukwu, Korey Walter, Carolyn Cook, Amanda Watters, Allegra Ploeg, Hanna Li, Danielle Tatum, Jacquelyn

Published 2026-06-29

📖 5 min read🧠 Deep dive

CC BY 4.0

Original authors: Xinyi Luo, James Pai, Hiyori Roberts, Jonathan Allotey, Joseph Ritondale, Kalli Segel, Vivien Okechukwu, Korey Walter, Carolyn Cook, Amanda Watters, Allegra Ploeg, Hanna Li, Danielle Tatum, Jacquelyn Turner

Original paper licensed under CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). ✨ This is an AI-generated explanation of the paper below. It is not written or endorsed by the authors. For technical accuracy, refer to the original paper. Read full disclaimer

Imagine a summer camp, but instead of archery and s'mores, the activities are suturing wounds, performing mini-surgeries on robots, and studying for the hardest test in college (the MCAT). This is IMPRESS, a special six-week program designed to help two very different groups of people grow at the same time: young college students dreaming of becoming doctors, and senior medical students who are just starting to learn how to be teachers.

Think of this program as a two-way street or a double-sided coin. Usually, summer programs focus only on the students getting help. IMPRESS is unique because it helps the "students" and the "teachers" simultaneously.

Here is a simple breakdown of how it works and what happened, based on the paper:

The Two Groups on the Street

1. The Travelers (Undergraduate Students)
These are college freshmen and sophomores, many of whom are the first in their families to go to college or come from lower-income backgrounds. They are like hikers standing at the base of a very tall, foggy mountain called "Medical School." They can see the peak, but the path up is unclear and scary.

The Goal: To give them a map, some hiking gear, and a guide so they feel confident enough to start climbing.
The Experience: They spent six weeks doing everything a medical student does: watching real doctors, practicing surgery skills on simulators, doing research, and getting help with their college applications.

2. The Guides (Medical Student Mentors)
These are fourth-year medical students. They are like experienced hikers who have almost reached the summit. They know the path, but they have never been asked to lead a group before.

The Goal: To give them a chance to practice being teachers and leaders before they become full doctors.
The Experience: They didn't just watch; they had to teach the undergraduates how to tie knots, how to use surgical tools, and how to study. They also took a special class on how to teach effectively.

What Happened? (The Results)

The researchers looked at the results like a coach reviewing game stats and listening to player interviews.

For the Travelers (Undergraduates):

Confidence Boost: Before the program, many felt unsure if they belonged in medicine. Afterward, they felt like they had a seat at the table. It was like going from thinking, "I don't belong here," to "I can do this."
Skill Up: Their knowledge of medical facts jumped significantly (from about 55% to 71% on a test). Their confidence in handling surgical tools more than doubled.
The "Belonging" Factor: They felt a strong sense of community. They realized that people who looked like them and came from similar backgrounds were already in the medical field.
The Outcome: Almost everyone (34 out of 35) said they still planned to become doctors. Many even kept in touch with their mentors a year later.

For the Guides (Medical Students):

Teacher Training: They learned that teaching isn't just about knowing the answer; it's about how you explain it. They got better at giving feedback and leading a group.
The "Pay It Forward" Feeling: Many said they wanted to help because they had received help themselves in the past. They felt a deep sense of reward in seeing the younger students succeed.
The Outcome: They felt more ready to be doctors who can also teach and lead. One student noted, "It was a two-way street; we learned from our mentees, too."

The Big Picture Analogy

Think of the IMPRESS program like a garden.

The undergraduates are the new saplings. They needed water (mentorship), sunlight (clinical exposure), and support (skills training) to grow strong enough to survive the winter.
The medical student mentors were the gardeners. By tending to the saplings, they didn't just help the plants grow; they also learned how to be better gardeners themselves. They practiced their tools and learned how to nurture life.

What the Paper Doesn't Say

It is important to stick to what the paper actually found:

The paper does not say these students are guaranteed to get into medical school (though three who applied were accepted).
The paper does not claim this program fixes all the problems of diversity in medicine, but it is a helpful step.
The paper does not prove that the medical students became perfect teachers, only that they felt more confident and skilled in teaching.

The Bottom Line

This study shows that when you build a program that helps young people explore medicine while training older students to be teachers, everyone wins. The young people get the confidence to keep climbing the mountain, and the older students get the practice they need to become the guides of the future. It's a win-win where the journey up the mountain is shared.

Technical Summary: Dual-Impact Outcomes of a Summer Medical Pathway Program

Problem Statement
The United States physician workforce lacks racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic diversity relative to the population it serves. Underrepresented students often face barriers to medical school entry, including unequal access to educational resources, financial constraints, and limited exposure to clinical environments. While pathway programs exist to address these upstream barriers, many evaluations focus primarily on long-term matriculation rates, often overlooking earlier motivational factors such as self-efficacy, skill confidence, and professional identity formation. Additionally, there is a gap in the development of future physician-educators; medical students frequently enter residency with limited formal training in teaching, feedback, and curriculum design. The IMPRESS program addresses these dual challenges by integrating undergraduate learner support with structured near-peer educator development.

Methodology
This study employed a prospective, exploratory, mixed-methods program evaluation design. The subject was the IMPRESS program, a fully funded, six-week summer immersive pathway for first- and second-year undergraduate students, paired with an elective course for fourth-year medical students serving as mentors.

Participants: Three cohorts of undergraduate students ( $N=35$ ) and a cohort of fourth-year medical student mentors ( $N=9$ for survey analysis). The undergraduate cohort was predominantly Black/African American (68.6%), with significant representation of low-income and first-generation college students.
Intervention: The undergraduate curriculum integrated five domains: clinical immersion, simulation/procedural skills (including laparoscopic tasks), research/scholarly development, medical school/MCAT preparation, and longitudinal mentorship. Medical student mentors participated in faculty-guided didactics on curriculum design, feedback, and inclusive teaching before serving as instructors and mentors.
Data Collection:
- Quantitative: Pre- and post-program paired assessments included general medical knowledge tests, an 11-item MCAT self-efficacy scale, research knowledge items, and laparoscopic simulation tasks (peg transfer and circle cutting). Medical student mentors completed anonymous post-elective surveys regarding teaching skills, leadership, and academic identity.
- Qualitative: Semi-structured focus groups and written responses from undergraduates were analyzed using a hybrid deductive-inductive approach informed by Social Cognitive Theory (SCT).
Analysis: Quantitative data were analyzed using paired Student's t-tests. Qualitative data were coded for themes related to SCT constructs (self-efficacy, social modeling, belonging). Inter-rater reliability was assessed, and findings were triangulated.

Key Contributions

Dual-Impact Model: The paper presents a feasible model that simultaneously empowers underrepresented undergraduates and develops medical student educators, creating a reciprocal learning environment.
Integration of Theory and Practice: The study operationalizes Social Cognitive Theory within a pathway program, demonstrating how clinical exposure, mentorship, and skill mastery can be structured to foster professional identity formation.
Educator Development Framework: It outlines a structured elective for medical students that moves beyond simple mentorship to include formal training in curriculum design, assessment, and feedback, addressing a gap in pre-residency educational preparation.

Results

Undergraduate Learner Outcomes:
- Intent and Belonging: 97% (34/35) of students reported an intention to pursue medicine. Qualitative themes highlighted increased confidence, a sense of belonging, and the value of structured support and shared experience.
- Knowledge and Skills: Medical knowledge scores increased significantly from 55.5% to 71.4% ( $p < 0.001$ ). MCAT self-efficacy rose from 62.2% to 74.8% ( $p < 0.001$ ). Research knowledge improved from 47.3% to 60.1% ( $p = 0.01$ ).
- Procedural Confidence: Laparoscopic exposure and confidence increased by 162%. 91% (32/35) of students completed both laparoscopic tasks within program-defined benchmarks.
- Mentorship: At one-year follow-up, 83% of respondents maintained contact with at least one mentor.
Medical Student Educator Outcomes:
- All surveyed mentors ( $n=9$ ) reported improved teaching, leadership, communication, and feedback skills.
- 89% reported an increased desire to pursue academic medicine, and 78% expressed increased interest in curriculum development.
- Qualitative feedback described the experience as an opportunity to "give back" and engage in reciprocal learning, with mentors noting they learned from their mentees.

Significance and Claims
The authors claim that IMPRESS illustrates a feasible dual-impact pathway model. The study suggests that integrated pathway programs can support undergraduate learners' confidence, sense of belonging, and preparation while simultaneously providing medical students with formative teaching and leadership experiences.

The paper explicitly frames these findings as exploratory. It acknowledges that the study does not establish causality due to the lack of a control group and the small, selected sample size. Furthermore, the authors note that while short-term gains in knowledge and self-efficacy were observed, the study does not yet demonstrate whether these perceptions translate into long-term outcomes such as medical school matriculation, retention, or residency performance. The significance lies in demonstrating that a structured, short-term intervention can effectively target early motivators for underrepresented students and provide a scaffold for future physician-educators, provided that institutional resources are available to sustain the model.