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Work In Progress: Adding Additional Methods to Identify Mistakes in an Undergraduate Biomedical Instrumentation Laboratory Course

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Conference

2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Location

Montreal, Quebec, Canada

Publication Date

June 22, 2025

Start Date

June 22, 2025

End Date

August 15, 2025

Conference Session

ELOS Technical Session 3: Advancing Engineering Competencies: From Labs to Writing

Tagged Division

Experimentation and Laboratory-Oriented Studies Division (DELOS)

Page Count

11

Permanent URL

https://peer.asee.org/57475

Download Count

2

Paper Authors

biography

Hannah Rosene Conover Kimmel University of Illinois at Urbana - Champaign Orcid 16x16 orcid.org/0000-0003-4460-1847

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Hannah Kimmel is a recently graduated PhD candidate at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She is actively seeking a teaching faculty position and is interested in student engagement, developing a sense of belonging in science for students, and bioengineering curriculum creation.

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Megha Agrawal University of Illinois at Urbana - Champaign

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Joseph Tibbs University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign Orcid 16x16 orcid.org/0000-0002-6315-9778

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Joseph Tibbs is a Bioengineering PhD candidate at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. He is interested in pursuing a passion for education by becoming a teaching faculty and exploring topics of ethics education, engineer identity formation, and bioengineering curriculum development.

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biography

Kaitlyn Tuvilleja University of Illinois at Urbana - Champaign

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Kaitlyn Tuvillea is a Bioengineering Undergraduate with a Statistics Minor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her interests in the therapeutics, cell and tissue engineering, and bioengineering curriculum development are complemented by her involvement in Society of Women Engineers (SWE), Women in Engineering (WIE), Biomedical Engineering Society (BMES), and Brain Matters.

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Rebecca Marie Reck University of Illinois at Urbana - Champaign Orcid 16x16 orcid.org/0000-0002-5894-4130

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Rebecca M. Reck is a Teaching Associate Professor of Bioengineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Her research includes alternative grading, entrepreneurial mindset, instructional laboratories, and equity-focused teaching. She teaches biomedical instrumentation, signal processing, and control systems. She earned a Ph.D. in Systems Engineering from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, an M.S. in Electrical Engineering from Iowa State University, and a B.S. in Electrical Engineering from Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology.

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Abstract

Providing meaningful feedback to each student in large courses can be time-consuming. In large laboratory courses, feedback can take even longer due to the nature of the assignments. Some features integrated into learning management systems (LMS) or tools like GradeScope, can improve efficiency and reduce grading time. However, there is still room for improvement. During the fall 2024 semester, this team explored additional ways to speed up the time it takes for students to identify mistakes made during a biomedical instrumentation laboratory course. The new feedback mechanisms included autograded pre-lab questions, additional checkpoints during lab experiments, in-class self-evaluation of circuit designs, and improved post-lab reflection prompts. The goal of these improvements was to decrease the amount of time between when the mistake was made and when the students were made aware of the mistake. Our hope is that students will learn more from their mistakes and will be less likely to repeat them if their mistakes are identified sooner.

We used participatory action research to identify improvements and analyze outcomes. The research team included the professor, a former teaching assistant, former students, a current teaching assistant, and a current undergraduate laboratory student. Additional feedback was also solicited from students enrolled in the course. So far, the new additions have improved the speed of feedback given to the students. Additional data will be collected and analyzed throughout the rest of the fall 2024 semester.

This biomedical instrumentation laboratory course is required for third-year bioengineering students at a large public university in the Midwestern United States. Students in other engineering majors also enroll in the course as a technical elective. In addition to the laboratory course, the students are also enrolled in a complementary lecture course that covers the theoretical background of biomedical instrumentation.

Kimmel, H. R. C., & Agrawal, M., & Tibbs, J., & Tuvilleja, K., & Reck, R. M. (2025, June), Work In Progress: Adding Additional Methods to Identify Mistakes in an Undergraduate Biomedical Instrumentation Laboratory Course Paper presented at 2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition , Montreal, Quebec, Canada . https://peer.asee.org/57475

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