Skip to main content
2024 BMES Annual Meeting Main banner
Icon Legend
This session is not in your schedule.
This session is in your schedule. Click again to remove it.

Biomedical Engineering Education

Biomedical Engineering Education - Poster Session A

Poster E10 - Biomedical Scientific Education and Equitable Design (B-SEED): A Pilot Program Evaluation

Thursday, October 24, 2024
10:00 AM - 11:00 AM EST
Location: Exhibit Hall E, F & G

Introduction:  Biomedical Scientific Education and Equitable Design (B-SEED) is a program designed to equip undergraduates with hands-on scientific literacy skills and an accessibility-focused approach to the design process to build their confidence as future engineers and encourage them to explore biomedical engineering research and industries. Our program, which began its pilot year in September 2023, focused on (i) connecting content and skills to real-world scenarios/case studies, (ii) undergraduate mentorship by faculty and staff, and (iii) discussion in a small peer group, to examine the effect of these initiatives on student retention, engagement, and self-efficacy, particularly of students from historically excluded backgrounds in engineering.

Our research questions:
1. Do scientific literacy, health disparity, and equitable device design workshops increase undergraduate engineering students’ intention to continue in the Cockrell School of Engineering?
2. Does program completion increase students’ confidence in engaging with higher-level engineering design problems?
3. Does hands-on education in scientific literacy, equity, and device design inspire more students to consider further education or a professional pathway in a biomedical engineering-related field?
4. Do students feel prepared to address health disparities when they iterate through the design process in their future classes, careers, etc.?

We hypothesized that B-SEED will have a positive impact on student retention via (i) mentorship, (ii) hands-on experience to improve academic self-confidence, and (iii) academic social integration and extracurricular involvement because B-SEED encourages students to incorporate principles of equitable healthcare and design into their engineering endeavors and teaches students the skills to begin initiating their own projects.

Materials and

Methods:  B-SEED employed workshops, simulations, journal clubs, and speaker presentations focused on biomedical engineering, health equity, and equitable medical device design. A portion of the funds covered the cost of attending the National Medical Device Makeathon, thereby eliminating the cost barrier to a pre-professional opportunity to implement the skills and background gained by the 6th month of the program.

Program participants were surveyed semesterly for two semesters (Survey 1 - Fall, program kickoff, Survey 2 - Spring, end of program) and answer options to outcomes-based questions in the survey included yes/no/not applicable, or ratings on a 3, 4 or 5-tier scale (e.g. very helpful, helpful, somewhat helpful, or not helpful). Outcomes-based questions were about participants’ intention to continue in the School of Engineering, confidence in engaging in higher-level engineering problems, interest in pursuing a biomedical engineering-related field, interest in graduate education, and their confidence in engineering against health disparity. Other question formats included check all that apply, and the following categories used a variety of question formats. Categories included: demographic data (age, race, ethnicity, disability), major and year. Social involvement and access to mentorship, utility of the program sessions, sessions attended, and content interest. Prior knowledge of health disparities (definition of a health disparity, patient attributes to identify one, preventability, involvement of engineer, and inclusion in college curriculum), medical device design, and scientific literacy (published papers read in the last six months, understanding, relevant field knowledge, and resulting interest in the field).

Results, Conclusions, and Discussions: Our 8-month program began with 21 participants and ended with a 95% retention rate. 21% of participants were first-generation, 81% female, 14% nonbinary or other, 69% racial/ethnic minority, and 13% self-reported disability. 29% more students correctly identified a health disparity. The proportion of students who’d read more than five research articles rose from 20% to 58%, and the number who read more than twenty increased by 15%. 14% more students indicated “interest” or “significant interest” in a graduate engineering education. The proportion of students feeling unprepared to enter a research role fell by 12%. All participants who completed the program indicated that B-SEED meetings helped increase their scientific literacy and background knowledge of biomedical engineering, with 25% stating B-SEED was very helpful. All B-SEED participants who competed in the National Medical Device Makeathon - in which 3 of 4 teams that B-SEED students were on finished in the Final 8 - indicated that B-SEED helped them feel more competent and prepared.

Student testimonials indicate that B-SEED has been “instrumental in deepening my understanding and involvement in addressing healthcare inequalities through BME innovations,” given them “insights into various research avenues…and [helped identify] areas of personal interest,” and “helped me realize that accessibility can be closer than I previously thought.” One stated it was “one of my strongest driving experiences to pursue health equity through engineering…I didn't realize how rewarding it would be to listen to the speakers and learn in an open and comfortable group setting outside of class.”

The reduction of students feeling unprepared to enter research endeavors, graduate engineering education coupled with responses indicating that completing the program better equipped them to peruse scientific literature and apply their knowledge of health disparities in a competition setting implies that B-SEED significantly enhanced undergraduate engagement and self-efficacy in engineering while encouraging students to incorporate principles of equitable healthcare and design into their engineering endeavors. In future iterations of this program, we hope to expand the project’s enrichment of students’ research acumen to a larger cohort and continue collecting data on participant outcomes.

Acknowledgements (Optional):  This work is based upon work supported primarily by the National Science Foundation under Cooperative Agreement No. EEC-2217741. Any opinions, findings and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.