Mentor-focused Professional Development for Investigators Initiating Discipline-based Educational Research (DBER) in Biomedical Engineering

Abstract

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.