Board 6: Work in Progress: Alternative Lab Reports for Biomedical Engineering

Karin Jensen; Paul Jensen

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Conference: 2019 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition
Location: Tampa, Florida
Publication Date: June 15, 2019
Start Date: June 15, 2019
End Date: June 19, 2019
Conference Session: Biomedical Engineering Division Poster Session
Tagged Division: Biomedical Engineering
Page Count: 9
DOI: 10.18260/1-2--32387
Permanent URL: https://peer.asee.org/32387
Download Count: 841

Paper Authors

biography

Karin Jensen University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign orcid.org/0000-0001-9456-5042

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Karin Jensen is a Teaching Assistant Professor in bioengineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Before joining UIUC she completed a post-doctoral fellowship at Sanofi Oncology in Cambridge, MA. She earned a bachelor's degree in biological engineering from Cornell University and a Ph.D. in biomedical engineering from the University of Virginia.

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biography

Paul Jensen University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

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Paul Jensen is an Assistant Professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in the Department of Bioengineering and the Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology. He received bachelor degrees in chemical and biomedical engineering at the University of Minnesota and a Ph.D. in biomedical engineering from the University of Virginia. Paul completed postdoctoral training at Boston College before joining the University of Illinois in 2016.

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Abstract

Communication skills are critical for engineering students to succeed in a wide variety of careers. This necessity is recognized by ABET in student outcome 3 “an ability to communicate effectively with a range of audiences” (1). Despite this, students may not view written communication skills as an important skill for engineers. Technical writing instruction and practice is often implemented in undergraduate laboratory courses where students write standard lab reports (abstract, introduction, materials and methods, results, discussion) that most closely resemble a scientific journal article. In an effort to demonstrate to students how they might communicate about experimental data in different ways and to prompt them to consider communicating data to a range of audiences and for varying purposes, we developed alternative lab report assignments for a biomedical engineering laboratory course offered to sophomore undergraduates. In addition to developing written communication skills, the writing assignments were designed to demonstrate to students how they might write in careers in the biotech industry. Here we describe the implementation of alternative lab reports for a Cell and Tissue Engineering lab course. The course is designed in four modules with each having an associated written report. For each of the four reports, students are presented with a scenario where they might collect data on one of four biologicals: a plasmid, a mammalian cell line, a drug, and an engineered enzyme. For each of these biologicals, students prepare a different type of technical report to share and discuss their data. Students complete a validation report where they are tasked with validating features of a plasmid, a product report where they are tasked with describing a mammalian cell line with associated protocols, a quality report where they prove that an engineered enzyme has better kinetics than the non-engineered version, and finally a standard lab report where students describe experiments on a “novel” drug they are characterizing. Presented here is the implementation of the report structure, associated rubric used for all reports, limitations, and preliminary student feedback.

Citation
Format

Jensen, K., & Jensen, P. (2019, June), Board 6: Work in Progress: Alternative Lab Reports for Biomedical Engineering Paper presented at 2019 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition , Tampa, Florida. 10.18260/1-2--32387

TY  - CPAPER
AB  - Communication skills are critical for engineering students to succeed in a wide variety of careers. This necessity is recognized by ABET in student outcome 3 “an ability to communicate effectively with a range of audiences” (1). Despite this, students may not view written communication skills as an important skill for engineers. Technical writing instruction and practice is often implemented in undergraduate laboratory courses where students write standard lab reports (abstract, introduction, materials and methods, results, discussion) that most closely resemble a scientific journal article. In an effort to demonstrate to students how they might communicate about experimental data in different ways and to prompt them to consider communicating data to a range of audiences and for varying purposes, we developed alternative lab report assignments for a biomedical engineering laboratory course offered to sophomore undergraduates. In addition to developing written communication skills, the writing assignments were designed to demonstrate to students how they might write in careers in the biotech industry. Here we describe the implementation of alternative lab reports for a Cell and Tissue Engineering lab course. The course is designed in four modules with each having an associated written report. For each of the four reports, students are presented with a scenario where they might collect data on one of four biologicals: a plasmid, a mammalian cell line, a drug, and an engineered enzyme. For each of these biologicals, students prepare a different type of technical report to share and discuss their data. Students complete a validation report where they are tasked with validating features of a plasmid, a product report where they are tasked with describing a mammalian cell line with associated protocols, a quality report where they prove that an engineered enzyme has better kinetics than the non-engineered version, and finally a standard lab report where students describe experiments on a “novel” drug they are characterizing. Presented here is the implementation of the report structure, associated rubric used for all reports, limitations, and preliminary student feedback.
AU  - Karin Jensen
AU  - Paul Jensen
CY  - Tampa, Florida
DA  - 2019/06/15
PB  - ASEE Conferences
TI  - Board 6: Work in Progress: Alternative Lab Reports for Biomedical Engineering
UR  - https://peer.asee.org/32387
DO  - 10.18260/1-2--32387
ER  -