The Twenty-Minute Take Home: Extension Experiments in a Mini Medical School

Bringing medical education home: empowering young learners and their families to explore healthcare careers together through hands-on experiments and bilingual resources.

Joseph C. Rumenapp, MD, PhD (1)

(1) Chicago Medical School, Rosalind Franklin University of Medicine and Science

Marginalized communities face significant barriers to equitable healthcare and health profession education, and medical school matriculation rates for Underrepresented in Medicine (URiM) students continue to decline. This will deepen the disparity of representation within the healthcare system and exacerbate inequitable access to primary care services in vulnerable communities. (1,2) The presence of URiMs is vital to a healthcare system that must be available to all communities. (3) Outreach and pathway programs are common strategies to create more equitable access to medical and healthcare profession education.

Since 2021, Chicago Medical School has hosted a Mini Medical School (MMS) for fourth grade students from local schools that is intended to expose youth to medical concepts and medical careers. (4) Each week, students learn about a body system, conduct experiments, and learn about nutrition. They get to walk the halls and enter the labs of medical school with medical students, physicians, and scientists. The program starts with a whitecoat ceremony and ends with a graduation celebration. MMSs, popularized since the 1980s, take a variety of forms and often focus on exposing children to health professions, (5-7) especially those from communities with fewer such opportunities. (8-9)

One strategy to assess our program has been to facilitate parent focus groups for feedback on supporting their young people. A common response was that parents wanted to be more involved and to have opportunities to engage their children at home. Building on my colleagues' work on parent resources, I created weekly take-home summaries in English and Spanish for each session. These included weekly learning objectives, a short home experiment, discussion questions for the family, a link to Spanish and English review videos from www.kidshealth.org, (10) and a bilingual vocabulary review requiring kids to use both languages to solve a puzzle. The Fellow Project Grant allowed us to purchase materials for “Twenty-Minute Take Home” activities and a plastic MyPlate template (11) as a part of the summaries to solidify concepts from the instruction. These activities allowed students to conduct experiments with family members, including using pH indicator paper to further learn about digestion and an incentive spirometer for lung capacity. The take-home experiments also included a bilingual 10-minute video from a scientific or clinical faculty member who identified as URiM and introduced themselves, their career, and the basic concepts of the experiment.

Preliminary feedback about the take-home activities was collected in the post-program focus group sessions. While further results are pending as part of a larger research project, some anecdotes from parents indicated that the take-home activities allowed students to develop confidence and expertise. One parent noted,

It's really exciting and surprising at the same time…It's a transition of leader and follower. You see, so now he's teaching me and I'm a student all over and they like that, they like the fact that they got my attention but they’re also teaching me something.

Another parent similarly explained about the take-home materials,

They are the things that expose other members of the family and they're learning too. So, it's a great concept. Without it, they would not have explored those different medical terms or those particular things that they bring home.

One student stayed after class with their science teacher to work on his science fair project about pH levels using the indicators provided in the program while another parent explained about the spirometers,

One of the benefits of the program is that they come home with stuff. So the last time was the lungs and the devices. So, she was very animated by demonstrating that to us, how it worked, and what each ball [in the spirometer] meant.

While the Aequitas project started to fill a small gap by building a home connection, there are opportunities for improvement. Future iterations could provide more guidance on how families can complete home experiments and results could be collected the following week to enhance, review, and solidify concepts. Another possible improvement could be to encourage students to do further research and bring it back to the program.

The Aequitas project attempted to engage families of students in MMS to enhance discussions about science, medicine, and medical education in their homes. The hopeful result of this work is to inspire young learners, many who come from URiM communities and marginalized neighborhoods, to see themselves as future healthcare professionals.

Acknowledgements:

I would like to thank Dr. Melissa Chen, our Aequitas Chapter faculty lead, for supporting this work as well as Chrysanthemum Gorospe and Rachael Lange for providing organization and administrative support for this project. Dr. Myrtis Sullivan and Dr. Mildred Olivier inspired me to seek out opportunities to engage families in the Mini-Medical School. My colleagues Kayla Talebi and Britany Mifsud contributed to early iterations of the parent engagement work. Iris Siguenza ensured the materials were translated and accessible to all students and families. Dr. Hector Rasgado and Dr. Frank Maldonado generously contributed their time to create bilingual videos of science experiments. Finally, I would like to thank Aequitas for the Fellow Project Grant that allowed for meaningful engagement with families. The quotes used are derived from an ongoing research project led by Dr. Myrtis Sullivan under IRB protocol CMS24-430.

References:

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10. Eat healthy with myplate. MyPlate.gov | U.S. Department of Agriculture. Accessed April 28, 2025. https://www.myplate.gov/.

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