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In addition to developing technical skills, engineering undergraduates must also be prepared to navigate the ethical issues they will encounter during their professional careers. In bioengineering in particular, students must be prepared to identify and solve the wide variety of ethics problems encountered in this rapidly-progressing field. Because of the importance of ethics education in engineering, ABET criteria for accreditation includes the requirement that graduating students be equipped with an understanding of professional and ethical responsibility and the ability to engage in engineering design while considering ethical, economic, environmental, social, and safety constraints. At the University of Washington, this requirement is satisfied by addressing ethical responsibility and engineering ethics problems throughout the bioengineering curriculum. Students are first exposed to ethical issues in the context of bioengineering in a recently-implemented course entitled Introduction to Bioengineering Problem Solving, BIOEN 215. This course serves as the foundation for the later bioengineering courses which also involve ethics instruction, including junior-level core courses and the Capstone Senior Design sequence. In this paper, we present our approach to engaging students in bioethics, through the use of case studies and a systematic tool that can be used to solve any type of ethics problem. During the initial two offerings of BIOEN 215 in 2011, case studies were utilized to introduce students to the wide range of possible ethics problems in bioengineering and to illustrate the complexity of ethical challenges. Students were introduced to case studies involving human subjects, medical device risk, research misconduct, and clinical trials in developing countries. Established medical research guidelines, ethical theories, and professional codes of ethics were discussed in the context of case studies. Case studies encompassed situations faced by clinicians, medical researchers, undergraduates, etc. and were presented to students and subsequently analyzed in groups. In addition to identifying ethical issues, students must be able to actually solve ethics problems. Thus, in this course we taught students an ethical analysis tool, the Four A’s. The Four A’s was first introduced by Budinger and Budinger in the text Ethics of Emerging Technologies and is a strategy to systematically apply guidelines when assessing the multiple aspects of an ethical problem, so that alternate solutions can be generated and evaluated. Students were taught the steps of the strategy through lectures and reading assignments and then were asked to apply the technique to a specific case. Based on student performance data, instructor observations, and student feedback, the case studies and Four A’s strategy were effective methods for engaging students in ethics education. Case-based learning was used to convey the real-world importance of ethical issues. Students were able to utilize the Four A’s strategy to thoroughly research, analyze, and solve ethics problems. Student feedback was overall positive, citing that having a structured framework with which to approach an ethics problem was valuable. Based on initial results, these techniques will help equip students with the understanding and the tools necessary to handle more complex ethical problems as they progress throughout their academic and professional careers.

Use of Case Studies and a Systematic Analysis Tool to Engage Undergraduate Bioengineering Students in Ethics Education