The purpose of this study is to investigate the relationship between students' patterns of reflective thinking and their performance in solving design problems. Reflective thinking is a critical element in the process of solving ill-defined design problems. Many educators are dedicated to finding ways to promote students' reflection. Yet few…

Graduate schools around the United States are working to improve access to science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) in a manner that reflects local and national demographics. The admissions process has been the focus of examination, as it is a potential bottleneck for entry into STEM. Standardized tests are widely used as part of…

Homeostasis is a core concept in systems physiology that future clinicians and biomedical professionals will apply in their careers. Despite this, many students struggle to transfer the principles governing homeostasis to concrete examples. Precourse assessments conducted on 72 undergraduate biology students enrolled in an introductory systems…

Nowadays, Augmented and VR in teaching disciplines such as Human Anatomy has made it feasible to promote learning through a gamification process that allows the development of teaching-learning proposals that improve students' motivation significant learning and not merely memoirist. This new practice moves away from the traditional methods used…

Metacognitive skills can have enormous benefits for students within engineering courses. Unfortunately, these metacognitive skills tend to fall outside the content area of most courses, and consequently, they can often be neglected in instruction. In this context, previous research on concept mapping as a teaching strategy points to meaningful…

Poster presentations to communicate scientific knowledge/understanding are a commonly used assessment tool. It can be a challenge for students (and staff!) to deliver clear information with minimal text on the poster. We have found that this format did not encourage imaginative project topics or posters. To enhance communication skills,…

Stargardt Disease was identified by German ophthalmologist Karl Stargardt in 1901. It is the most commonly inherited macular dystrophy condition (Light et al., 2017), with an estimated worldwide prevalence of 1 in 8,000 to 1 in 10,000 (Cai et al., 2018). Stargardt Disease is the juvenile version of macular degeneration (Daly, 2014), with its early…

The multi-disciplinary nature of science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) careers often renders difficulty for high school students navigating from classroom knowledge to post-secondary pursuits. Discrepancies between the knowledge-based high school learning approach and the experiential approach of future studies leaves some students…

Launching biomedical innovations based on clinical demands instead of translating basic research findings to practice reduces the risk that the results will not fit the clinical routine. To realize this type of innovation, a meta-analysis of the body of research is necessary to reveal demand-matching concepts. However, both the data deluge and the…

Metabolomics is the data-driven science of small molecules. Untargeted metabolomics, using liquid chromatography-high resolution mass spectrometry (LC-HRMS), differs greatly from targeted metabolite assays, using nominal mass LC-MS instruments, as it generates thousands of metabolite features which are not quantified and are identified "post…

This article offers a longitudinal computational-rhetorical analysis of biomedical writing on opioids. Using a corpus of 1,467 articles and essays published in the "New England Journal of Medicine" and the "Journal of the American Medical Association" between 1959 and May 2019, this study evaluates diachronic shifts in (a) the…

Pipeline programs in health and biomedical sciences have gained attention as students who engage in these programs are more likely to enter into associated fields. In 2012, to support the mission of Oakland University William Beaumont (OUWB) School of Medicine, the Future Physicians Summer Enrichment Program (FPSEP) was launched for regional high…

Undergraduate research experiences are an increasingly common component of STEM education practices. Student benefits associated with these experiences include increased interest and retention in STEM and/or research fields. Across the country, twenty-three states and Puerto Rico are supported through the National Institutes of Health's…

In the biomedical and behavioral sciences, it is widely recognized that researchers conducting studies involving human participants must respect the autonomy of research subjects. There is significant debate in the clinical research ethics and bioethics literatures about what it means for an individual to be autonomous. According to proponents of…

Group projects center learning as a collaborative process, but they often produce mixed results in terms of student commitment and final products. The authors outline their experience with a course designed to engage undergraduate biomedical engineering students in a semester-long group experience and share data from their students' analyses of…