Picturing Possibilities and Envisioning Selves; PiPES3 - Appalachia, spanning 13 states from Alabama to New York with over 25 million people, 42% of whom live in a rural community (Appalachian Regional Commission [ARC], 2017) is a medically underserved area whose residents experience significant healthcare challenges. Rural workers also are underrepresented in jobs resulting from STEM majors and rural high school students aspire to pursue STEM fields at lower rates and are less academically prepared in STEM topics than their peers (Saw & Agger, 2021). We know that rural Appalachians often distrust community outsiders (Keller & Helton, 2010), so we must attract residents from within these areas to enter the biomedical and behavioral research workforce to reduce these health challenges. To accomplish this, we propose Picturing Possibilities and Envisioning Selves (PiPES3), which aims to increase the number of rural Appalachian high school students choosing to pursue post-secondary education and enter a STEMM (science, technology, engineering, math, medical) field. We will use a strengths-based lens that highlights cultural values to inform our framework, emphasizing ways in which the students’ internal strengths and external familial and community resources provide concrete supports for students’ future selves. Importantly, we cannot assume that increasing STEMM interest and skills will be sufficient to attract students from this region to these careers, given barriers to post-secondary education in general. Therefore, our long-range goal is to develop efficacious interventions that reduce contextual barriers and increase supports for and interest in both post-secondary education in general and STEMM in particular among rural Appalachian youth. Our hypotheses are that addressing both and doing so over time, will increase interest in both college-going and STEMM in rural Appalachian students. We have three specific aims in meeting these goals: 1) Increase science identity, as well as self-efficacy, outcome expectation beliefs, and interests related to college-going and STEMM; 2) Teach skills to help students navigate barriers and increase supports for pursuing post-secondary education and STEMM careers; and 3) Determine the additive effects of our new program experiences on college-going and STEMM beliefs. Achieving these aims will provide concrete tools for schools across rural Appalachia, and perhaps other regions, to increase the number of their students equipped to join the high-growth biomedical and behavioral research workforce.
