Hats & Ladders for Health: Data-driven Decision-Making for Future Health Citizens and Professionals

Despite a growing demand for health care workers, most young people lack awareness of health career options and how to pursue them. Narrow career exposure, insufficient advising, lack of encouragement to pursue STEM subjects, and lack of mentoring are obstacles for many youth. This project will help adolescents identify and overcome challenges they have pursuing careers in healthcare, making them more confident in their ability to undertake in-demand health career pathways. To do so, a joint team from Hats & Ladders, Inc., Mentoring in Medicine, the University of Texas at Austin School of Human Ecology, CareerVillage and Applied Curiosity Research will design, develop, and test Hats & Ladders for Health: Data-driven Decision-Making for Future Health Citizens and Professionals (HLH). This blended digital experience targets 9th- and 10th-grade students and educators in general career and health education programs, and will consist of a digital gamified app, project-based activities, near-peer mentoring sessions, and a robust instructional toolkit with training videos, progress reports, lessons and other educator supports for providing accurate, actionable student feedback. The overall outcomes of HLH’s data-driven, inquiry-based intervention could have broad-reaching public health impact and are to (1) increase students’ confidence in their ability to pursue in-demand health career pathways and solve problems along the way; (2) increase their ability to find, understand, and use information to make health-related decisions; and, (3) develop educators’ capacity to provide quality health career guidance. Designed to strengthen our organization’s impact on high school youth, our intervention will bring a novel set of interactions––as requested by our existing users––and use them to deepen inquiry-based learning related to health careers and literacy during the critical stage of early high school. In Phase I, the H&L R&D team collected, analyzed, and input data from healthcare professionals into a new health career database that we integrated into the HLH app. To gather the data, we developed, and tested for relevance, an online survey targeting respondents through CareerVillage’s community of health professionals and Mentoring in Medicine volunteers. A subset of survey respondents participated in video interviews. Survey data and video snippets were tagged with metadata and input into the database, enabling us to recommend authentic and relevant health content to students. We tested usability and feasibility of app designs and prototypes with students in small groups and dyads. In Phase II, we are iterating and developing a final product and conducting a mixed-methods evaluation with educators and students in both formal and beyond school instructional settings. The evaluation, led by the External Evaluation team at Applied Curiosity Research, will help us determine the effectiveness of HLH to increase students’ health career efficacy and health literacy.