Biomedical engineering education最新文献

Black individuals are underrepresented in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields. In 2016, Black students earned 9% of science and 4% of engineering bachelor's degrees compared to a total of 56% of science and engineering bachelor's degrees earned by White students. Even with similar entering rates, Black students leave STEM majors at 1.4 times the rate of White students. These data reflect the manifestation of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) barriers faced by Black students and scientists to successfully navigate higher education and pursue careers in STEM fields. There remains a critical need to develop better ways to recruit, retain, train, and graduate Black students in STEM, especially within predominantly White institutions. Biomechanics is a growing interdisciplinary and translational STEM field where DEI barriers persist. Thus, the Black Biomechanists Association (BBA) was founded in 2020 with intentions to reduce these barriers and give much needed support to Black students and biomechanists in STEM spaces. The organization's mission is to uplift and enrich Black biomechanists in their academic and professional careers. Our objectives to achieve this mission provide a supportive environment and resources to address the challenges, needs, and interests of Black biomechanists, as well as aid in the biomechanics community's efforts to achieve DEI. In two short years, BBA has developed a needs-based mentoring program, hosted professional development and culturally-competent mentoring workshops, and produced communications to educate the biomechanics community and broader audience on culturally-relevant topics that impact Black biomechanists. The purpose of this article is to share the work and impact of BBA to date.

We describe our experiences with the first offering of a new program, BMEntored, for supporting first-year doctoral students in Biomedical Engineering (BME) during their first semester. The goal of BMEntored was to enhance the first-semester experience of first-year doctoral students in BME with an emphasis on guiding students in selecting a research supervisor and promoting cross-cohort, cross-lab social connections.

Metacognitive skills can have enormous benefits for students within engineering courses. Unfortunately, these metacognitive skills tend to fall outside the content area of most courses, and consequently, they can often be neglected in instruction. In this context, previous research on concept mapping as a teaching strategy points to meaningful learning. The purpose of this innovation paper is to report an application of concept mapping (1) to facilitate metacognition steps in students, and (2) to identify the muddiest points students struggle with, during both in-person and online instruction of a problem-solving-based biomedical engineering course. This innovation article also looks at the usefulness of concept mapping through instructor and student perceptions and students' class performance. The entire concept mapping intervention was conducted during weeks 8-10 of the Spring 2019 in-person quarter and during weeks 3-4 and 8-10 of the Spring 2021 online quarter. The exercise involved concept mapping, explanation and discussion with peers, and answering structured reflection prompts. Each concept map activity was contextualized to the metacognitive knowledge domain of the revised Bloom's taxonomy. The average class performance was compared between students who completed concept mapping vs. those who did not, using a t-test and one-way ANOVA at alpha = 0.05 significance level followed by a Tukey HSD test. Students' concept maps and reported answers were analyzed qualitatively following the concept mapping intervention. During the Spring 2019 in-person quarter, 59.30% of students completed concept mapping with reflection, whereas 47.67% completed it in spring 2021 online instruction. A two-tailed, unpaired t-test indicated that concept mapping did not significantly enhance students' class performance (p > 0.05) within each of the in-person and online instructions. Peers' suggestions to students to improve concept maps revealed themes related to course concepts, prerequisite concepts, and the act of concept mapping itself. Concept mapping was effective in revealing the muddiest points of the course. Concept mapping did not significantly enhance students' class performance either in-person or online instruction (effect sizes were 0.29 for the 2019 in-person quarter and 0.33 for the 2021 online quarter). However, instructors and students' perceptions reflected that concept mapping facilitated metacognition in a problem-solving-based biomedical engineering course both during in-person and online instruction. Most students (78%) were optimistic about the usefulness of concept mapping for this course, and 84% were inclined to apply it for a variety of other courses.

Supplementary information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s43683-022-00066-3.

Mental health challenges have been rising across college campuses. To destigmatize wellness practices and promote student mental health, we present a novel technical project in an introductory bioengineering course that explores stress management techniques through physiology, biosensors, and design. We hypothesize that if students measure objective, physiologic impacts of stress management techniques on themselves, they may be more likely to realize the benefits and use those techniques when needed. Additionally, through this data-driven project, we aim to appeal to engineers' critical thinking nature. To support students in selecting stress management techniques for themselves, mindfulness is introduced and practiced in the course. Initial student feedback on the introduction of mindfulness into the classroom is positive. The COVID-19 pandemic has emphasized the need to focus on student wellbeing in addition to physical health. Integration of wellness into the core curriculum can normalize the use of these resources within engineering departments and colleges and equip students with stress management tools for their careers. Ultimately, this curricular development lays the groundwork for institutional enhancement of undergraduate STEM education by supporting student wellness through the engineering curriculum.

Supplementary information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s43683-021-00060-1.

The teaching tip described here relates to a department level initiative to gather and act on student experiences in real-time during the COVID-19 outbreak in the Spring 2020 semester. The survey was developed to be an ongoing, department level, data collection source that could capture, triage, and react to student's unique situations as they arose. This enabled us to coordinate across courses, follow-up and provide students and instructors assistance in real time, and also gather information that informed decision making for our summer online courses as well as our planning for the fall. In this teaching tips article we describe the opportunities and processes for using such a survey to identify and capture aspects of the students' lived experience that influences the effectiveness of curricular change. Doing so fills a need, especially when unexpected changes in learning environments are required, to employ concepts of learner analysis to understand and plan educational experiences for students, even when such experiences are in flux or the concepts are used informally.

Supplementary information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s43683-021-00047-y.