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Creation of a Novel Biomedical Engineering Research Course for Incarcerated Students.

ABSTRACT: Options for incarcerated individuals to participate in higher education in prison programs (HEPPs) have expanded in recent years to include courses in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, however these students remain an underserved population in the United States. Thus, there are opportunities to expand the available offerings, increase the diversity of coursework available by introducing subjects such as biomedical engineering (BME), and include cocurricular and extracurricular activities widely considered critical components of undergraduate training including research experiences. As such, a year-long program was developed to introduce students pursuing a bachelor's degree in an HEPP through an R1 institution to research principles in BME. This course introduced students to disciplines within BME, offered opportunities to gain research experience as knowledge-creators, and supported engagement with a scientific learning community. Using a student-centered approach, the course was designed to incorporate activities for reflection, goal setting, and dialogue among participants and sought to leverage students' funds of knowledge and areas of personal scientific interest. This course represents a transferable model for offering BME courses and research-centered opportunities to students enrolled in other HEPPs and an opportunity to promote equity and access in higher education.

Supplementary information

The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s43683-022-00071-6.

SUBMITTER: Speer JE

PROVIDER: S-EPMC9244394 | biostudies-literature |

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Project description:A ubiquitous dilemma in medical education continues to be whether and how to integrate research competencies into the predoctoral curriculum. Understanding research concepts is imbedded in the six core competencies for physicians, but predoctoral medical education typically does not explicitly include research education. In an effort to quickly report academic research findings to the field, this is the second in a series of articles reporting the outcomes of a research education initiative at one college of osteopathic medicine. The first article described the competency model and reported baseline performance in applied understanding of targeted research concepts. This second article reports on the learning outcomes from the inaugural year of a course in basic biomedical research concepts.This course consisted of 24 total hours of classroom lectures augmented with web-based materials using Blackboard Vista, faculty moderated student presentations of research articles, and quizzes. To measure changes in applied understanding of targeted research concepts in the inaugural year of the course, we administered a pretest and a posttest to second year students who took the course and to first year students who took an informatics course in the same academic year.We analyzed 154 matched pretests and posttests representing 56% of the 273 first and second year students. On average, the first year (53) and second year students (101) did not differ in their mean pretest scores. At posttest the second year students showed significant improvement in their applied understanding of the concepts, whereas the first year students' mean posttest score was lower than their mean pretest score.This biomedical research course appears to have increased the second year students' applied understanding of the targeted biomedical research concepts. This assessment of learning outcomes has facilitated the quality improvement process for the course, and improved our understanding of how to measure the benefits of research education for medical students. Some of the course content and methods, and the outcome measures may need to be approached differently in the future to more effectively lay the foundation for osteopathic medical students to utilize these concepts in the clinical setting.

Project description:In the spring of 2020, brick and mortar colleges had to abruptly adapt to the reality of COVID-19 and transition to entirely online environments in a manner of weeks. This required a rapid (< 2 weeks) acquisition of knowledge and flexibility in using technology, most commonly Zoom. Upon completion of the semester, and after debriefing with numerous faculty teaching required courses across the biomedical engineering department at ____ University, the most common comments were that the online engagement and the online environment were nothing close to the traditional classroom environment: students were less likely to show up; less likely to enable their cameras so you could see their faces; and less likely to ask or answer questions in class. To address these issues, in this paper we make easily implementable recommendations that will increase engagement and improve the inclusivity of online courses that can be applied to any biomedical engineering course offered in an online environment. Student engagement is especially important for promoting student learning as has been well documented in education research (Taylor and Parsons in Curr. Issues Educ, 2011. Retrieved from http://cie.asu.edu/; Armstrong in The Best Schools: how human development research should inform educational practice. Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development (ASCD), Alexandria; 2006). The four recommendations for improving the engagement in the online classroom are: (1) make it a priority to stress the importance of having their cameras on during lecture and explain why it's important; (2) have a "Daily Question" at the start of lecture where all students respond in chat followed by a brief discussion; (3) make use of the polling feature in Zoom to frequently assess student understanding and upon discovering student confusion on any given question, send them to breakout rooms to discuss, incorporating a quick active learning exercise that can help reduce the monotony of online lecture; and (4) create handouts that are circulated prior to class for students to take different pieces of a particular problem, solve them in their teams in individual breakout rooms, and then discuss the content and results back in class with all teams together. These techniques were shown to increase engagement and attendance and fostered a welcoming environment in the online classroom, contributing positively to student experience and in turn allowing students to achieve student learning outcomes despite the difficult circumstances.

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Creation of a Novel Biomedical Engineering Research Course for Incarcerated Students.

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