A Coding Scheme for Measuring Biomedical Engineering Students’ Breadth of Exposure to the Discipline

Biomedical engineering (BME) is an increasingly broad field. Yet, the experience of instructors is that undergraduate students just entering a BME program typically voice a very narrow view of the field, focusing primarily on prosthetics and stem cells, and therefore have limited interests within the BME discipline. The purpose of this work was to both develop a coding scheme that could be used to classify and monitor students’ biomedical engineering interests and demonstrate how it could be used in a particular context to gather base-line data to which future classroom interventions, focused on expanding students’ interest and understanding, might be compared. To develop and test a coding scheme, students’ proposed topics for an assigned term paper in a junior level introductory BME course were examined. The coding scheme was based on the 2019 Biomedical Engineering Society (BMES) conference tracks and subtracks and was applied to two years’ worth of data. When applying the coding scheme to two separate offerings of the course, differences were found in students’ proposed topics. A discussion of possible factors contributing to these differences is provided, along with implications for instructional practice and limitations of the BMES-based coding scheme.