Background | Implementation | Student Performance | Reflections | Comments

Student Performance

Open-ended Homework Problems

At the beginning of the semester, most students had difficulty even attempting to answer the open-ended questions. There were, however, a few students who grasped the "big picture" concept immediately, though even their answers initially lacked depth. As the semester progressed, more students could recognize and organize the thought-processes required for this type of analysis, and depth of analysis for all students increased.

Students noted that there was often enthusiastic discussion and debate among team members during private homework team meetings. Even though teams
were self-selected, peer evaluations and comments at the end of the semester indicated that there were three teams out of five in which at least one member of the team did not contribute sufficiently. This potential downfall of teamwork did
not appear to have a significant negative impact on student attitude in the classroom setting.

Journal Club

The Journal Club was a fun classroom activity for both students and me. Three Journal Club sessions were held in the semester, typically in a session after an exam or a major project deadline. The journal topics I picked were based on lecture themes students expressed interest in. All the articles were chosen from the Journal of Biomedical Materials Research (JBMR), the premier journal in the field of biomaterials. It was somewhat challenging for me to find recent articles that were narrow enough to be completely understood by students at this level. Interestingly, several of the newer graduate students and undergraduate students did not know what a peer-reviewed journal article was. A handout questionnaire about the article had to be done before class in order for the student to receive full credit. It was intended to prompt students about what they should look for in any journal article.

The application of "real life" work in the classroom seemed to be a welcome break for students. Nearly all students read the article in advance and answered questions about it. We had active debate during the in-class discussions of the article. In the course evaluations, students commented on the usefulness of this exercise for preparation for the final project.

First Project: Reverse Engineering of a Medical Device

Some of the students were very engaged by this project, while others did only a cursory evaluation as evidenced by presentation enthusiasm and the extent and depth of the evaluations presented. Students self-reported strong positive results from the biomedical product "reverse engineering" methods. During group presentations and resulting discussions, students actively engaged in understanding the issues and comparing analyses between different product types without prompting from me. The purpose of this project was to prepare students for the thought processes and criteria needed to evaluate and develop a biomaterial in a product application as required in the second project. It was not clear if the reverse-engineering project was successful in this development, but it was an educational project enjoyed by all.

Second Project: Phase I NIH SBIR Proposal

Many students found defining a topic difficult for the final project, so I assisted each group as they narrowed down specific subjects. Areas of interests and choices of topics varied greatly among groups. On the written mock Phase I NIH SBIR Proposals, the intellectual property, regulatory, and technical analysis was marginal to satisfactory, but cost and resource analysis for all teams was grossly underestimated, despite intermediate review and suggestions. From my experience as a reviewer for NIH SBIR proposals, the student teams made many of the mistakes that I also see typically made by novice grant applicants. I hope that this experience will help the students improve their ability with grant proposals in their future careers.

Students self-reported that while this experience was more difficult than a standard term paper, they also felt it was more beneficial and interesting. Grading of the proposal was actually easier and more interesting for me than doing term papers. Project presentations made by the teams were, for the most part, excellent, as they took great pride in sharing their ideas. During presentations, other students asked many questions. These questions were of much higher quality and substantially greater in number when I compare them to questions over term paper presentations that students had done in previous years.

Peer-evaluation of the presentations and content was accomplished by asking students to pretend that they were venture capitalists who were deciding how to divide $1 million among the five projects. They had to justify the spending through written comments. Student teams received anonymous feedback regarding their funding plan. It was interesting to see how students self-evaluated and spent money. They appeared to realize the shortcomings of their own work after completing their presentations and hearing peer questions. In my opinion, students received and considered this feedback better than they do the written comments I typically provide.

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