Clinician-Engineer Self-Concept in Biomedical Engineering students and Its Relationship to Race, First-Generation Status, and Mode of Delivery

Abstract

Clinician-engineer self-concept in biomedical engineering students and its relationship to race, first-generation status, and mode of delivery Introduction and abstractRetention, recall, comprehension, and measurable skills are mainstays of the scholarship of teaching and learning, and yet they represent only a fraction of what engineering educators hope to achieve through education. The development of self-efficacy, for example, is a common goal and is often measured as a psychological construct. Less commonly measured constructs that are nonetheless commonly valued by educators are the development of creativity, perseverance (grit), and self-concept.Self-concept is particularly interesting in the context of career goals. Biomedical engineering undergraduates are often drawn to clinical practice rather than to careers in engineering -54% according to one study [1]. This implies an equivalent self-concept among BME majors as clinicians and as engineers. Indeed, this has been shown to be the case in previous work [2]. These data sets were small, however, and they left unknown how malleable self-concept may be over the course of a single semester, for different groups, or in different learning environments.We performed a multi-year study of BME students' career self-concept as engineers and as clinicians. The goal was to determine (a) if career self-concept, either in the absolute sense or in its change over time, differed by demographic group; and (b) whether career self-concept was influenced by learning modality. The pedagogical changes brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic served as a natural experiment for the latter.Over the course of six contiguous semesters spanning Fall 2019 to Fall 2021 we measured absolute and relative self-concept (engineer versus clinician) from 333 students via explicit declaration, and via an implicit attitudes test (IAT). The IAT is a psychological test that relies on repeated measures of response latency in a subject's association of two concepts -in this case, between the concepts of self and other, and the concepts of clinician and engineer. We interpreted the resulting measure of implicit bias as a measure of career self-concept.The data suggest that career self-concept is, on average, remarkably stable with modest and oftentimes insignificant changes over the course of a single semester, and with few or no trends across the pre-, mid-, and post-pandemic timeframe. It varies greatly between individual students, however, and can change greatly over the length of a single semester, though students gaining in engineering career self-concept are balanced by students losing in engineering selfconcept. We identified differences in self-concept change between racial/ethnic groups and between first-generation and continuing-generation students. We also found that students cannot accurately judge their own changes in engineering career self-concept. MethodsThis research was approved by the University of Virginia Social and Behavioral Sciences IRB, protocol number 3236.