Facilitating Student Metacognition Using Exam Wrappers and Concept Maps in a Problem Solving-based BME Course

Fundamentals of Bioengineering is a required 2nd-year Biomedical Engineering course aimed to address fundamental bioengineering concepts through the application of conservation principles to biomedical engineering problems. This course serves as a prerequisite course for the upper-division courses in which subsequent courses rely on students’ content knowledge from this course. We are therefore continually improving methods to make content more accessible from a learning perspective and enhance conceptual understanding, and as a result, improve overall student performance in the class. Metacognitive skills can have enormous benefits for students within this course, and help students when pursuing higher levels of education, and perform complex tasks in professional life requiring one to take greater responsibility for one’s learning. Unfortunately, these metacognitive skills tend to fall outside the content area of most courses, and consequently, they can be often neglected in instruction. In a large Biomedical Engineering class focused on solving mass and energy transfer problems, promoting metacognitive skills was a challenge that was met with two specific interventions – 1) introduction of exam wrappers and class-wide discussion of relevant study strategies, 2) formulating concept maps and discussing them in groups with peers. This paper shares the mechanisms of execution of both of these strategies along with key insights from their implementation in a large sophomore class on Fundamentals of Bioengineering.