Research Initiation: A Study of Biomedical Engineering Student Self-Efficacy Toward Design

Indiana University, Bloomington IN

Investigators

Abstract

The formation of workforce-ready biomedical engineers requires that students are prepared to confidently approach complex problems. In the United States, biomedical engineers will need to confront challenges in an environment of rising healthcare costs, decreasing average life expectancy, and increasing socioeconomic disparities in health outcomes. Solutions to these and other contemporary problems will require new and innovative medical technologies, suggesting that the future of biomedical engineering will be increasingly design-oriented. The engineering design process provides a framework for the type of open-ended problem solving required by grand challenges. The development of critical thinking skills and application of these skills toward the design process have been studied thoroughly by engineering education researchers; this work has informed instructional techniques aimed at improving critical thinking among engineering undergraduates. Much less has been done to investigate the role of intrapersonal skill development in student design achievement; however, substantial research on student self-efficacy (confidence) has informed freshman engineering retention and gender gaps in engineering perseverance. This research will provide new insights into the role of self-confidence in design achievement among biomedical engineering undergraduates. Surveys and rubrics have been developed to track design confidence and abilities as students progress through a rigorous, multi-disciplinary, and gender-diverse biomedical engineering program on an urban health-life sciences campus. Results from this study will inform development of instructional techniques, educator training, and workplace professional development. These impacts are relevant and transferable across disciplines and institutions. Biomedical engineering programs have consistently awarded the second highest number of engineering bachelor's degrees to women, yielding a gender-diverse engineering student population from which to learn. Discipline-specific research of a biomedical engineering student population would provide engineering educators knowledge of student self-efficacy barriers that may limit design success. Applying a mixed-methods approach, the social cognitive theory construct of self-efficacy defined by Bandura will be used to investigate the following central research question: To what extent and in what ways does continuous exposure to hands-on design projects throughout a curriculum influence self-efficacy and design performance of biomedical engineering students? Quantitative methods will specifically inform the questions 1) Do biomedical engineering students report changes in self-efficacy when continuously challenged with biomedical design situations? and 2) Does self-efficacy relate to biomedical engineering student design achievement? A third question 3) How do biomedical engineering students describe their self-efficacy toward biomedical design throughout a curriculum will guide qualitative inquiry and shape efforts to describe mediating variables. Finally, this work will demonstrate the approachability and utility of social science research for technical faculty looking to improve engineering formation processes. Application of the self-efficacy framework to engineering design education is highly relevant to the training of a diverse and competent STEM workforce. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.