Browsing by Subject "biomedical engineering"

Now showing 1 - 5 of 5
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    Empathy and ethical becoming in biomedical engineering education: A mixed methods study of an animal tissue harvesting laboratory
    (Taylor & Francis, 2021) Hess, Justin L.; Miller, Sharon; Higbee, Steven; Fore, Grant A.; Wallace, Joseph; Biomedical Engineering, School of Engineering and Technology
    Biomedical engineering presents a unique context for ethics education due to the human-centric nature of biomedical engineering coupled with the pervasiveness of animal-based practices. This study summarises the design of a pedagogical practice intended to enhance students’ abilities to recognise ethical issues in biomedical engineering practice and inquire into normative aspects of the discipline. The context of the study is an introductory biomechanics course wherein students harvested animal tissue, critically reflected on this experience, and discussed the experience in class. We brought two theoretical frameworks to this investigation pertaining to empathy and ethical becoming. We employed a four-phase mixed methods research design that included quantitative comparisons of changes in empathy and related phenomena, thematic analysis of written reflections, an observation and focus group, and triangulation of these results. Quantitative data remained stable before and after the course. Thematic analysis of reflections revealed five themes: research design, treatment of animals, beneficence, worth of life, and emotional engagement. The observational and focus group results emphasise affective considerations of engineering practice. This study provides a guide for future biomedical engineering education efforts that deal with ethically sensitive, emotionally powerful, and visceral experiences, as well as for research pertaining to empathy and ethical becoming.
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    Mentor-focused Professional Development for Investigators Initiating Discipline-based Educational Research (DBER) in Biomedical Engineering
    (ASEE, 2021-07) Miller, Sharon; Higbee, Steven; Biomedical Engineering, School of Engineering and Technology
    Our work (NSF PFE: RIEF Award 1927150) initiates a discipline-based educational research study of student design self-efficacy in an undergraduate biomedical engineering (BME) program. A key component of this work focuses on our own professional development as engineering education researchers, which contributes to our abilities to undertake current and future engineering education studies. Our professional development goal is to establish and follow a mentoring plan that facilitates our development of engineering education research skills. We targeted three areas for learning and development as researchers: (1) social science research in design education, (2) mixed methods research, and (3) evidence-based teaching. To that end, we strategically invited engineering education research mentors to our team, deliberately structured our mentor conversations with literature readings to foster growth, and purposefully documented this process by continually responding to reflection questions in a professional development journal. Our approach to include our own professional development in our Research Initiation in Engineering Formation grant has proven instrumental in collecting data and in connecting us with the engineering education community.
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    Thinking Beyond the Service Course Model: Intentional Integration of Technical Communication Courses in a BME Undergraduate Curriculum
    (ASEE PEER, 2022-08-23) Stella, Julie; Higbee, Steven; Miller, Sharon; Technology and Leadership Communication, School of Engineering
    Contemporary engineers must be confident communicating technical and non-technical information to diverse audiences. Traditional curricula may rely on highly generalized communication courses, which are not targeted to the disciplinary content or communication needs of specific engineering fields. To better prepare engineering undergraduates, students may benefit from a curriculum that deconstructs boundaries between disciplinary content mastery and effective communication. Here we describe efforts to intentionally develop and pair technical communication courses with existing biomedical engineering (BME) laboratory courses. To achieve this, interdisciplinary faculty came together through a Community of Practice to design and implement a curriculum that maximizes the benefit of writing instruction through strategic timing and more field-specific relevance. Our work developed a strategically timed integrated curriculum wherein two one-credit technical communication courses replaced an existing 2-credit technical communication course requirement—in the new model, students take a one-credit technical communication course in their sophomore year and a one-credit technical communication course in their junior year. By integrating the courses earlier in the program, we highlight how BME sophomores are now able to apply writing skills immediately to classroom assignments and continually grow their communication skills over the course of the program. Additionally, the integrated curriculum limited the genres of writing to those commonly found in the BME field (industry and academia), with an emphasis on writing as both a process and a product. We will share the changes made within both the engineering and technical communication courses. Briefly, students completed culminating overlapping assignments that were drafted and polished in the TCM class then submitted for a technical grade to the BME course instructor. Throughout, our approach focused on building student-student, student-instructor, and instructor-instructor relationships. Classroom communities and student-student relationships were grown and nurtured through technical peer review, collaborative writing, and team membership (e.g., roles, relationships, management, leadership). In the faculty Community of Practice, key strategies included: 1) integrated, ongoing, and consistent assessment of written and oral communication student deliverables, and 2) a shared content-related vocabulary provided continuity and connections among technical skills and communication to augment the student experience. Here we describe efforts to intentionally develop and pair technical communication courses with existing biomedical engineering (BME) laboratory courses. To achieve this, interdisciplinary faculty came together through a Community of Practice to design and implement a curriculum that maximizes the benefit of writing instruction through strategic timing and more field-specific relevance.
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    Tracking Capstone Project Quality in an Engineering Curriculum Embedded with Design
    (IEEE, 2020-10) Higbee, Steven; Miller, Sharon; Biomedical Engineering, School of Engineering and Technology
    This Work in Progress Innovative Practice paper describes efforts to track student design gains in an undergraduate biomedical engineering (BME) curriculum in order to measure the effect of newly integrated design projects on capstone success. Engineering curricula often culminate in team-based capstone experiences in which students face complex design problems. Student capstone teams face significant challenges during design, as solving difficult engineering problems can require a multitude of skills, access to diverse resources, and teaming ability. Assessing the quality of student design work is also non-trivial, as few shared frameworks or assessment tools exist for engineering design. Capstone experiences compel students to connect and apply undergraduate curricular learning in a final design experience, and design-rich curricula should better prepare students for success in capstone courses. To this end, we recently embedded team-based engineering design projects in our curriculum at the 200- and 300-levels. Consequently, we have the opportunity to track capstone design projects for students with varying amounts of curricular design experience. We developed a BME Capstone Design Rubric, adapted from several sources, and used it to score design reports submitted by student teams. Thus far, we have used the rubric to assess student design growth at the 200- and 300-levels and to collect baseline data for capstone design reports. Our preliminary results demonstrate that students produce reports of increasing quality as they complete additional embedded design projects. Due to the growth we see in project reports from the 200- to 400-level and qualitative data that support the benefit of embedded design experiences to capstone success, we expect to be able to measure significant differences between capstone design reports produced by students with varying levels of curricular design experience. This Work in Progress begins to address the research question: Does embedding design projects throughout an undergraduate engineering curriculum affect capstone project quality?
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    Work in Progress: Vertical Integration of Engineering Design in an Undergraduate BME Curriculum
    (ASEE, 2019-06) Higbee, Steven; Miller, Sharon; Biomedical Engineering, School of Engineering and Technology
    Relevant and robust biomedical engineering programs integrate challenging, hands-on engineering design projects that require student teams to develop and deliver functional prototypes in response to biomedical design problems. The inclusion of such projects throughout Biomedical Engineering (BME) curricula not only brings active learning to the classroom but helps students improve as team members, decision makers, and problem solvers. This work highlights how sophomore and junior level engineering design projects can increase students’ fundamental engineering design knowledge and self-reported confidence in approaching design projects. By steadily increasing the complexity of engineering design experiences throughout the BME undergraduate curriculum, our continued work studies whether intentional, vertical alignment of engineering experiences ultimately better prepares BME undergraduates for their senior design capstone projects and their professional pursuits.