Professional Competency Development in a PBL Curriculum

Substantial dialogue exists regarding the needs of the engineering profession and the changes in engineering education necessary to meet them. Important to this change is an increased emphasis on the professional competencies as identified by the Washington Accord and the ABET professional skills for engineering graduates and how to educate for them. This paper will explore the potential for a project based learning engineering curriculum model to meet this need. It will summarize a newly developed upper-division undergraduate project-based learning (PBL) engineering program in the U.S. engineering educational system and its approach to professional competency development. Based on the ABET intent, students graduate with integrated technical/professional knowledge and competencies. The program does not have formal courses; instead learning activities are organized and indexed in industry projects where they are solving complex and ill-structured industry problems. The program started in January 2010 and has 75 graduates to date and has earned ABET-EAC accreditation. A mixed-methods research approach will address the research question: “What is the professional development trajectory of students in the new project based learning (PBL) curriculum?” Quantitative method includes the development of an instrument to measure student growth in professional competencies. Qualitative measures include an interview protocol to understand which components of the PBL model affected the student professional development trajectory. The paper will provide initial results and analysis for the quantitative study, which indicated a positive impact on student attainment of the professional competencies in the PBL curriculum as compared to students in a traditional curriculum

Informal Learning as Opportunity for Competency Development and Broadened Engagement in Engineering

Informal learning is increasingly being recognized as a way to complement the formal curriculum within engineering and provide additional opportunities for competency development while engaging diverse students. Learning about engineering occurs throughout life, via experiential and spontaneous opportunities that inform our understandings of the world. Learning is not confined to the engineering curriculum and class time but, rather, continues informally and implicitly throughout the daily lives and activities of university students. Often framed in contrast to formal learning, informal learning is more as it represents a significant portion of students’ time and effort and contributes to their persistence, competence development, and broadened engagement. This chapter provides an overview of informal learning, discussing its definition, history, and settings and activities relevant to engineering education. The second section of the chapter focuses on the benefits and outcomes of informal learning, related to competency development and engagement of diverse learners. The third section identifies implications and provides recommendations for engineering researchers and practitioners to study, integrate, and recognize informal learning as an opportunity to prepare the current and future generations of engineers for 21st-century challenges, via cultivating the requisite competencies and engaging students with a range of backgrounds and experiences

A Multi-Decade Response to the Call for Change

Engineering and society have always been intertwined, especially with the accepted realization of technology\u27s significant and rapidly increasing influence on the evolution of society. As a profession, engineering has a vital role in sustainably meeting needs and exploring opportunities that are ever changing and evolving. As societal and industry needs have evolved, engineering education itself has raised the call several times for evolving the way engineers are educated; however, the recent history of engineering education is, overall, one of missed opportunities. This was brought to a headline recently as ASEE leadership authored an article entitled “Stuck in 1955, Engineering Education Needs a Revolution.” Those words say it all. We see a need for a revolution in engineering education that looks at developing a whole new engineer that is equipped to operate in the age of information and Industry 4.0. This is vital to not only the field of engineering but for society. This paper parallels the calls for change in engineering education with the development story of a multi-disciplinary engineering education model that is often referred to as a beacon of light for change in engineering education. As is highlighted in the currently ongoing ASEE workforce summit series, the world of engineering is shifting beneath our feet. The world of engineering education must shift with it or face irrelevancy. The future iterations of this program are focused on developing graduates with digital savvy, new skills in innovating and collaborating, problem framing expertise, and horizontal leadership skills, while putting emphasis on the impacts in the economic development of rural regions. In the initial stages, 1990’s–2000’s, the program’s faculty spent time innovating in courses and curricula trying to shift towards the recently released ABET 2000 student outcome criteria in a rural community college setting. The mid-2000’s brought the development of a multi-disciplinary upper division university satellite program that embraced the Aalborg (DK) model of PBL. The new multi-disciplinary program had ABET outcomes at its core, focusing on the development of a whole new engineer, especially developing innovative strategies to intentionally promote growth of the professional person. By 2020, the program had achieved disruption, earning an ABET innovation award and being named an “emerging world leader in engineering education” in the Reimagining and Rethinking Engineering Education report. The latest evolution of the program combines on-line learning and work-based learning for a sustainable model that serves a culturally diverse nationwide audience of community college completers. This is a story of innovative curricula putting team-based project learning at its core. Promising strategies addressed in the paper include ABET outcomes, reflection, identity building, metacognition, teamwork, industry PBL, recruiting, learning communities, and continuous improvement. The conclusion puts a spotlight on where the program and engineering education in the U.S. needs to journey next

A Scoping Review of the Relation Between Problem-based Learning and Professional Identity Development in Medical Education

There is a substantial amount of research pointing to the benefits of pedagogical approaches such as problem-based learning (PBL) and the importance of developing professional identity as a physician in medical education. The aim of this review is to investigate the existing literature concerned with the relation between PBL and professional identity development in undergraduate medical students. We performed a scoping review of six electronic databases to map out how the relation between PBL and professional identity development in undergraduate medical students is presented in the existing literature. Eight peer-reviewed full text articles were retrieved as eligible for review. The most important conclusion from our work is that even though the topic of professional identity development in medical education has been studied quite extensively, there is a lack of knowledge about how new types of pedagogical approaches such as how a PBL curriculum influences medical students’ professional identity development

Teaching medical anthropology in UK medical schools: cultivating autoethnographic practice among medical students

oai:repository.canterbury.ac.uk:96w02Behavioural and social sciences (BSS) are a core component of undergraduate medical education in the United Kingdom. Despite the formal recognition of BSS by the UK’s General Medical Council (GMC), anthropology remains largely at the periphery in the medical curriculum. Medical students often describe it as ‘fluffy’ or as ‘common sense’, in comparison to biomedical learning content. To make anthropology more relevant and applicable to future clinical practice, we draw on ethnographic data (interviews, focus groups, field notes and reflective texts written by medical students) collected by an anthropologist during fieldwork in two UK medical schools. We suggest moving this content out of the preclinical phase and instead incorporating it into the clinical phase. Specifically, we propose that having students conduct a micro-autoethnography during the clinical phase brings together two crucial aspects of medical student training: BSS principles and formation of a professional identity. Embedding these concepts in this specific context will allow students to process tensions they may feel between interactions they observe in a clinical context and team versus what they have been formally taught. This process allows them to negotiate their own professional identity between practice and ideal while more robustly situating BSS content in a relevant and immediately applicable manner within the current constraints of the medical curriculum

Curriculum renewal for interprofessional education in health

In this preface we comment on four matters that we think bode well for the future of interprofessional education in Australia. First, there is a growing articulation, nationally and globally, as to the importance of interprofessional education and its contribution to the development of interprofessional and collaborative health practices. These practices are increasingly recognised as central to delivering effective, efficient, safe and sustainable health services. Second, there is a rapidly growing interest and institutional engagement with interprofessional education as part of pre-registration health professional education. This has changed substantially in recent years. Whilst beyond the scope of our current studies, the need for similar developments in continuing professional development (CPD) for health professionals was a consistent topic in our stakeholder consultations. Third, we observe what might be termed a threshold effect occurring in the area of interprofessional education. Projects that address matters relating to IPE are now far more numerous, visible and discussed in terms of their aggregate outcomes. The impact of this momentum is visible across the higher education sector. Finally, we believe that effective collaboration is a critical mediating process through which the rich resources of disciplinary knowledge and capability are joined to add value to existing health service provision. We trust the conceptual and practical contributions and resources presented and discussed in this report contribute to these developments.Office of Learning and Teaching Australi

A conceptual framework of student professionalization for health professional education and research

Objectives To present a conceptual framework of student professionalization for health professional education and research. Methods Synthesis and discussion of a program of research on competency-based education. Results Competency-based education relies on active, situation-based group learning strategies to prepare students to become health professionals who are connected to patient and population needs. Professionalization is understood as a dynamic process of imagining, becoming, and being a member of a health profession. It rests on the evolution of three interrelated dimensions: professional competencies, professional culture, and professional identity. Professionalization occurs throughout students’ encounters with meaningful learning experiences that involve three core components: the roles students experience in situations bounded within specific contexts. Educational practices conducive to professionalization include active learning, reflection, and feedback. Conclusions This conceptual framework drives a research agenda aimed at understanding how students become health professional and how learning experiences involving action, reflection, and feedback foster that process and the advancement of professional practices

Teaching Strategies for Shaping the Conversation in Nursing Ethics Education

Nursing as a profession has had an enduring past that has responded to the changes and challenges within a complex healthcare system. In a 2014 Gallup survey, nurses were recognized as the top profession in the areas of honesty and ethical standards. For the last thirteen years nurses have earned this honor. According to the American Nurses Association’s (ANA) president Dr. Pamela Cipriano, “The public places its faith in nurses to practice ethically. A patient’s health, autonomy and even life or death, can be affected by a nurse’s decisions and actions” (P. Cipriano, personal communication, March 12, 2015). Nurses have a commitment to the public as the public recognizes nurses’ ability to care for those seeking health and healing (American Nurses Association, 2015). The American Nurses Association’s commitment to ethics has a long-standing history within the nursing profession dating back to the 1800s with the first professional code of ethics embraced in 1950 (ANA, 2015). Since that time, the Code has evolved with the changes within nursing, healthcare, technology, society, and the environment. The purpose of the Code was to create non-negotiable, normative statements that outline the obligations, values, and principles for nurses as individuals, groups of nurses, and the profession. The Code provides the framework for nurses’ understanding of their commitment to individuals, families, communities, and populations (ANA, 2015). Since its infancy, the Code has been viewed as a guide for ethical analysis and decision-making within the profession. It is grounded in “nursing theory, practice, and praxis in its expression of the values, virtues, and obligations that shape, guide, and inform nursing as a profession” (ANA, 2015, p. vii). The Codeserves as a resource for nurses in their ethical milieu to execute their ethical responsibilities and obligations (Johns Hopkins Berman Institute of Bioethics, 2014). Nurses are expected to uphold the values and ideals of the nursing profession in all areas of their life (ANA, 2015). Individuals who aspire to enter the nursing profession need additional guidance and education within nursing school curriculum. Nurse educators have the opportunity and obligation to guide undergraduate and graduate nursing students in the areas of nursing ethics, ethical analysis, and ethical decision-making to produce ethical practitioners. The subsequent sections of this scholarly work is comprised of the following: the significance of the project explained; questions posed moving forward in the literature; topic background; theoretical foundation and professional standards that support nursing ethics and education; suggested evidenced-based frameworks for teaching nursing ethics; emerging themes from the literature; identified gaps in the literature; and recommendations for nurse educators and nurse educator practice