The impact of an introductory biomedical engineering course on students’ perceptions of the engineering profession

• Autores: Antonio Miguel Cruz, Adriana Rios Rincon, William Ricardo Rodríguez Dueñas, Néstor Flórez Luna, Leobardo Alejandro Quiroga
• Localización: The International journal of engineering education, ISSN-e 0949-149X, Vol. 32, no. 1 (Parte A), 2016, págs. 136-149
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • After their first year roughly 50% of engineering students do not continue in that major. One cause could be that studentshave little idea as to what the profession of engineering is about. Freshman introductory courses provide a first approach tothe engineering profession. Therefore, understanding the role of introductory engineering courses to increasing studentknowledge of the profession is a relevant issue. The purpose of the study is to describe how student perceptions of theengineering profession overall change as a result of their educational experience in an introductory biomedical engineeringcourse. This is a pre- post-test with no control group study design. One class (n= 41) on a first-year biomedical engineeringcourse participated in a hybrid Project-based-learning (PBL)-lecture learning strategy. A survey composed of ademographic and 5-point Likert (‘‘1’’ is strongly disagree and ‘‘5’’ is strongly agree) sections measured students’perceptions of the engineering profession and was administered (paper-based) to all the students enrolled on thiscourse. The students’ perceptions of the engineering profession were pooled into 3 main groups of skills, i.e. Technicalskills, Professional skills, and Project management skills. Wilcoxon signed-rank test statistics were conducted to analyzethe research question. Our analysis showed statistically significant results (pre-survey mean and SD: 4.01, 0.07; and post-survey mean and SD: 4.21, 0.05,p< 0.003), indicating the students’ overall perceptions of the engineering profession hadsignificantly improved by the end of the course. The results indicated that the students’ overall perceptions of theengineering profession had significantly improved by the end of the introductory course.