Learning Assessment In Problem Based Learning For Bme Students

In the fall of 2001, the Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech inaugurated its undergraduate degree program. The two anchor courses in the curriculum, BMED1300/2300 have adopted an innovative educational approach called Problem-based Learning or PBL that has been used in medical schools for more than a decade. In this approach, teams of eight students tackle real world Biomedical Engineering problems guided by a faculty tutor. In this paper, we discuss the challenges of designing appropriate assessment instruments for a PBL course. Since the primary emphasis in PBL is on students developing identified cognitive behaviors and collaboration strategies as well as science and engineering concepts, the assessment instruments must mirror these priorities. These behaviors, however, are more qualitative than quantitative in nature, which is where the challenge comes in. Here, we describe the assessment tools we have developed, present a justification for their development and report on the overall success of this educational experiment. Problem-based Learning in Biomedical Engineering: A Rationale The field of Biomedical Engineering (BME) represents a merger between traditional engineering disciplines such as mechanical, chemical, and electrical engineering and the biology-based disciplines of life sciences and medicine. This merger was prompted by the need to improve procedures such as diagnostic testing, noninvasive surgical techniques, and patient rehabilitation. In the last twenty years, BME has evolved into one of the fastest growing fields while having a significant impact on medicine, biotechnology, and basic science. The multidisciplinary nature of Biomedical Engineering creates particular challenges on the educational front. Medical technology changes at such a rapid pace that classroom practitioners are hard pressed to keep abreast of advancements in all the related fields. On the student front, the multidisciplinary nature of the field demands that students develop multidisciplinary skills and knowledge. They need the modeling and quantitative skills of traditional engineers, but they also need the systems understanding representative of a more biological approach. In short, they need to be fully conversant in two intellectual traditions that are in some ways at odds with one another. While engineering seeks to analyze the world in order to set constraints and design, the life sciences work from hypotheses towards explanatory accounts of phenomena. Reconciling these two disparate practices requires cognitive flexibility and true interdisciplinary thinking. In an attempt to reconcile these worlds and foster interdisciplinary thinking among our undergraduate and graduate students, the BME Department at Georgia Tech has adopted a model of learning and a set of educational practices that have been used in medical education for more P ge 701.1 Proceedings of the 2002 American Society for Engineering Education Annual Conference & Exposition Copyright © 2002, American Society for Engineering Education than a decade. Referred to as Problem-based Learning or PBL, this approach draws on constructivist pedagogy, which assumes that learning is the product of both cognitive and social interaction arrived at through authentic problem solving. The PBL tutorial, as the learning environment is called, consists of a group of no more than eight students, a problem to be solved and a tutor/facilitator. The classic PBL version used in medical education utilizes rich authentic medical problems, which support free inquiry. This freedom encourages student-directed learning and increased learning motivation. In our undergraduate program, we have adopted the same version. For two semesters, freshman and sophomore BME students tackle complex real-world problems in teams of eight with the guidance of a faculty tutor. What gets learned, the routes the team takes to solve the problem and the problem solutions arrived at are determined by the group, not the facilitator. His/her role is to question, prod and help students develop skills at the process or problem attacking level. To support students in handling complex, ill-structured problems, the group utilizes the in-class white boards divided in such a way as to scaffold the reasoning strategies used by engineering in solving problems. The PBL tutorial, a cornerstone of the BME educational program, aims to provide students with valuable real-world experiences (clinical and research) which help them develop true interdisciplinarity. Learning Goals in Two Environments: Traditional Classrooms and the PBL Tutorial While traditional classrooms and PBL tutorials both aim for students to learn engineering/ science concepts and skills, the PBL setting has additional learning goals. Altogether there are five: the development of effective self-directed learning strategies, the construction of useful disciplinary knowledge, the development of disciplinary-specific reasoning strategies, increased motivation for learning and improved collaboration skills. Students become better at self-directed learning by identifying areas of interest and going after the information that will help them understand those areas. In PBL, this is referred to as inquiry. Inquiry or information gathering and application activities assist students in defining and solving problems. Since student teams receive no resources except for the problem statement, they must first identify what they are missing to solve the problem, and then go out and find what they need to move forward in the problem space. A sample problem statement is provided below. How to Sterilize Mad Cow Disease Contaminated Waste? You work for Biodyne Inc, based out of Medina, OH (NASDAQ Symbol PBL). Biodyne stock has plummeted along with the rest of the high tech stock market. This makes investors unhappy. Thus management is looking for new markets to help Biodyne reclaim its position as a biotech innovator. Your select team of bioengineers has been selected to work out the design parameters for the disposal of waste infected with Mad Cow Disease. Our illustrious management team, after reading much of the popular literature and performing many spreadsheet calculations, has determined that there is a one billion-dollar a year market for the sterilization of such waste. While the waste sterilization market is a mature one, this new potential market opportunity presents itself primarily due to the fact that incineration alone is not enough to render Mad Cow infected waste safe. We need to formulate and evaluate methodologies for the effective sterilization of such waste. Management at Biodyne has the fullest confidence that you will use your advanced knowledge of macromolecules and proteins to accomplish your task within the next two weeks. However, we do realize that your task will not be an easy one but know that you will be inspired by our company motto – “FAILURE IS NOT AN OPTION!” to attain complete success in the most topical (and potentially lucrative) of topics. The student team tackles the problem by first mining the problem statement for what they already know. In the problem above, students may know something about Mad Cow disease P ge 701.2 Proceedings of the 2002 American Society for Engineering Education Annual Conference & Exposition Copyright © 2002, American Society for Engineering Education from the popular press. They soon realize, however, that they know nothing about the disease at the biological level. What causes it? Why is incineration ineffective? How is it transferred to humans? This realization prompts them to develop a set of learning issues or questions to be answered, which constitutes the inquiry for the next session. From this list, each student chooses an area that s/he will research and report back to the group. This self-directed learning phase involves tracking down the resources necessary to answer the identified questions, digesting the material and bringing information back into the group. This cycle of finding and developing knowledge, bringing it into the problem space, identifying new learning issues and research is repeated until a solution is reached. Undergraduate students, however, rarely have sufficient experience in locating appropriate materials to answer the evolving questions. Their search skills are generally poor; they have no experience reading journal articles and they often lack the disciplinary knowledge that would help them understand the papers they locate. These are all things that improve as the semester proceeds, but not without several cycles of moderate failure in achieving what they had gone out to achieve. The assumption that follows from this cycle is that students will develop more effective research strategies over time and also feel more motivated to learn because they have identified their own learning issues rather than responding to those identified by the instructor. They are further motivated since they are responsible to the group for learning the material well to teach it to others, so that they can move forward toward a problem solution. Students in a PBL tutorial just like those in traditional engineering classrooms are expected to learn course content, but the facts and concepts should be anchored and integrated into a complex problem--one they have just solved. This means that there is no sequencing of content from easy to hard. Rather easy and hard content are both discovered within the same problem and students have to make sense of it for themselves with the help of the group members. Their understanding, as a result, looks more like a rich case history of interrelated nodes and links rather than a collection of facts and concepts loosely linked. Ideally recall of course material will be situated or contextualized in the rich problem context, more closely resembling the understanding of experts’ rather than novices’. Further storage and recall of material will