Biomedical and Life Sciences students often experience that the skills they learn in their research courses do not fully prepare them to communicate and collaborate with people from different backgrounds in their future STEM careers. As part of an NRO Comenius Teaching Fellow project, this SoTL-project investigates the impact of a new course designed to enable students to grow professionally, while contributing to knowledge creation. 

Background information

In Regenerative Medicine (RM), knowledge is created at the intersection of disciplines. Yet, professionals often feel unprepared for this cross-disciplinary environment, which can lead to misunderstandings and unclear expectations within teams. To improve research and accelerate biomedical innovation, students need guidance in developing strong interprofessional collaboration skills. Therefore, this project developed a 10-week interprofessional course ‘Collaborative Regenerative Medicine’. In this course, Biomedical Sciences (BMS) students collaborate with Life Sciences (LS) students from a University of Applied Sciences. The course adopts Community-Engaged Learning (CEL) and real-world problems in training students to produce new knowledge.

Aims

This project aims to investigate if the newly developed course Collaborative Regenerative Medicine (intervention) leads to 1. increased professional self-awareness and 2. feelings of preparedness in both university and applied science STEM students.

Questions that guide this research aim are:

• Is there a change in attitude towards collaboration and perceived level of preparedness?
• Which learning goals do students formulate in the course, and are they similar or different across BMS and LS?

Project description

To answer the first research question, quantitative data in the form of pre- and post-rankings from a questionnaire on the value of collaboration and STEM work field preparation will be collected and analyzed through comparison. Next to that, qualitative data in the form of the 360-degree portfolio’s, in which each students formulates personal learning goals, will be collected and analyzed.

References

• Grunwald Associates LLC. (2022). Key insights from select NASEM publications.
• Hirudayaraj, M., et al. (2021). Soft Skills for Entry-Level Engineers: What Employers Want. Education Sciences, 11(10), 641. https://doi.org/10.3390/edusci11100641
• Marbach-Ad, G., Hunt, C. & Thompson, K.V. (2019). Exploring the Values Undergraduate Students Attribute to Cross-disciplinary Skills Needed for the Workplace: an Analysis of Five STEM Disciplines. Journal of Science Education and Technology, 28, 452-469. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10956-019-09778-8
• Sachmpazidi, D., Olmstead, A., Thompson, A.N. et al.Team-based instructional change in undergraduate STEM: characterizing effective faculty collaboration. International Journal of STEM Education, 8(15). https://doi.org/10.1186/s40594-021-00273-4
• Van Ravenswaaij, H., Bouwmeester, R. A. M., van der Schaaf, M. F., Dilaver, G., van Rijen, H. V. M., & de Kleijn, R. A. M. (2022). The generic skills learning systematic: Evaluating university students’ learning after complex problem-solving. Frontiers in Education, 7.https://doi.org/10.3389/feduc.2022.1007361