A Skills-focused Approach to Teaching Design Fundamentals to Large Numbers of Students and Its Effect on Engineering Design Self-efficacy

Abstract

Biology and Chemistry from St. Francis College in Ft. Wayne, Indiana and his Ph.D. in Physiology from the University of Arizona. Will did his postdoctoral training in Molecular Biophysics at the University of Vermont under David Warshaw. His research interests include novel assessments of educational efficacy, the molecular basis of cell movement, and the mitigation of infectious diseases.

Clinician-engineer Career Bias and Its Relationship to Engineering Design Self-efficacy among Biomedical Engineering Undergraduates

“…Finally, and related to both of these, if implicit career self-concept is more sensitive to recent events, it may be especially helpful in narrowing interventions to specific semesters of study or to specific curricular elements. For example, our data are consistent with previous work showing that engineering design self-efficacy improves during both project-based and skills-based design courses [7], [21]. Courses such as these may prove to be strong mediators of change in persistence to engineering careers, but it is unknown whether the effects of such learning experiences persist over time.…”

Creativity Activities in a Design Course Fail to Elicit Gains in Creativity Over and Above those Elicited by the Design Course Itself

“…Self-efficacy is an individual belief in one's ability to attain successful outcomes. It is positively correlated with successful academic outcomes [7], and engineering design selfefficacy has been shown by us previously to improve during either project-and skills-based design courses [8]. We find that while this design course was associated with large semester-long improvements both in creativity and self-efficacy, direct training in creative thinking did not bring about additional improvements.…”

“…Classroom setting: A second-year design course in biomedical engineering at the University of Virginia was delivered in both the fall and spring semesters of the 2017-18 academic year, each semester by the same instructor. This course focuses on development of skills for the late stages of the engineering design process -prototyping, testing, and iteration -and was shown to increase engineering design self-efficacy [8]. Individual training was provided in a variety of fabrication techniques and other skills that we judge to be valuable to the engineering design process as it pertains to medical devices.…”

An Online Team-Based Practical Exam in Lieu of Final Reports for a Design Course

“…This course has been described elsewhere in greater detail. 4,5 Briefly, Individual training was provided in a variety of fabrication techniques and other skills that we judge to be valuable to the engineering design process as it pertains to medical devices. These included: Students were required to purchase the embedded controller learning kit in lieu of a textbook for this course.…”