Suzanne A. Olds

The VaNTH Bioengineering Curriculum Project

The NSF-sponsored VaNTH Engineering Research Center in Bioengineering Educational Technologies is developing a website, www.vanth.org/curriculum, to provide a forum for ideas about bioengineering curriculum. Two elements of that site are: 1) a listing of recommended core content, as opposed to core courses, for biomedical engineering undergraduate programs, and 2) recommendations for creation of curricula in terms of both content and pedagogy. This presentation addresses these two area. Our recommendations are intended to allow programs to meet a set of standard criteria that will allow industry, in particular, to understand what a biomedical engineer is, while allowing universities to meet local constraints and take advantage of their own strengths. Feedback from a broad cross-section of the bioengineering community is now needed to achieve agreement on core elements of a biomedical engineering curriculum.

Work in progress - promoting conceptual understanding through effective peer discussions in large classes

Using personal response systems (PRS) in large lecture classes has been suggested as one way to encourage the active involvement of students in this challenging pedagogical environment. Positive correlations between PRS use and course grades have been shown, but few have attempted to determine what components of the active learning are most effective. Some factors that may contribute to the positive correlation include: increased time in which students are actively applying concepts in class, increased exposure to the type of questions asked by a particular instructor, and peer discussion opportunities that often accompany PRS use. We are most interested in the latter factor, as we believe that knowledge construction is social and peer discussion is an effective technique to promote conceptual understanding. By studying peer discussions, we can gain information on how to structure these social interactions so they lead to the most conceptual understanding. We have initiated a study of peer discussions with an experienced PRS instructor. This instructor has included several classroom scenarios where students respond to a PRS question, discuss the question with a peer, and then vote again. We are tracking several characteristics of the peer team (gender, comfort level in discussing with peer, familiarity with peer, comfort level with material) and we will determine the effectiveness of these discussions by 1) correlating them with the number of correct PRS responses and 2) listening to the recorded discussions of five groups.

Work in progress - Engineering ethics in a design paradigm

Many engineering students may feel that ethics is ambiguous and subjective, and that studying ethics is not a good use of their time. Ethics is indeed far from the cut and dry precision of their technical coursework, but it is hardly without structure or rigor. To bridge the perceived gap between engineering and ethics, we felt that the abstract aspects of engineering and the concrete aspects of ethics should be brought closer together. One such area of engineering, in which students already have explicit training dealing with ambiguous non-quantitative problems, is design. We have therefore attempted to model an approach to engineering ethics on the principles of engineering design. The ethical problem is analogized as a design problem, with the principles of the Belmont report as the design goals. We are assessing this approach by employing a pre- and post survey of ethical attitudes, and a pre- and post essay response to an ethical case.