(C-107) An Interactive Guide to Aid Students in Ethical Analysis for their Capstone Design

Introduction:: A thorough understanding of ethics is a critical aspect of undergraduate BME education, and the Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology (ABET) has specific criteria for this outcome. In addition to ethics, BME students should be able to make critically informed decisions regarding the implications of their work for healthcare disparities, as their education and future careers are most likely involved with healthcare. A critical place where ethics should be considered is the senior capstone design project completed by all undergraduate students. A review of prior senior design reports at our institution indicated only a cursory engagement with ethics topics. The goal of this project was to design and evaluate a scalable curriculum specific to the BME senior capstone to aid students in more deeply considering the ethical implications of their projects and to prepare them to do this type of critical thinking throughout their imminently approaching careers. The timing of this training is key as students at this phase of their academic career are concretizing their professional plans and future commitments.

Materials and Methods::
An interactive guide was created and implemented in the Canvas learning management system to aid students in creating a complete and thoughtful ethics statement for their senior capstone design reports. The modules utilize a “choose your own adventure” approach to allow for autonomous implementation by groups with various project topics which we divided into four types: Treatments/Implants, Medical Devices, In vitro/In silico Models, and Measurement Devices. The guide also includes prompts for accompanying ethics discussion with the students’ project advisors. The online modules conclude with the students creating a comprehensive ethics analysis that can seamlessly integrate into their final report.




A rubric was created with the help of an ethicist, Prof. Yunus Telliel, to score the ethics statements and test the effectiveness of the interactive guide (Table 1). Ethics statements from AY2022 senior project reports were used as the control group. Three pilot groups completed the online ethics course and provided their ethics statements which were scored using the rubric. Feedback from both the advisors of the project and students who completed the online ethics course was used to improve the modules. After incorporating feedback, improved modules were provided for the remaining 2022-2023 senior project groups. The ethics statements created by these groups were then scored using the rubric by two team members and compared to previous years’ scores with one-way ANOVA tests to assess the effectiveness of the guide; a p< 0.05 was considered significant.




Results, Conclusions, and Discussions::
The students and advisors reported that they benefited from the interactive guide. The overall scores for the prior year ethics statements without the guide were 3.6±3.3 (mean±SD, n = 33). Ethics statements submitted from groups who used the final guide this year received overall scores of 8.9±4.4 (n = 23). It should be acknowledged that within the scope of these ethics statements, a perfect score of 20 is beyond expectations, as not all projects have topics that can be thoroughly applied to each grading category. Scores 3 or lower would be considered poor understanding and consideration of ethics, whereas a score of 8 or higher indicates a good grasp on ethical considerations for their project.




The average total score of the ethics statements from teams using the guide was 145% higher than from the previous year’s reports (p < .001). Scores across all rubric criteria were significantly higher this year than for the group reports from last year (scores and p-values shown in Fig.1). The Cohen’s d effect size for the total average score comparison was large (d = 1.37).; the lowest effect size observed for an individual grading category was still moderate (d = 0.65).




Due to the timeline of the project, we were not able to provide the guide to groups until late in their projects. For future implementations, we recommended that students complete the interactive guide in the beginning of the project to raise potential ethical issues then update their statements periodically throughout the project. Further, advisors are encouraged to utilize the guide to enhance their own understanding of the ethics of their projects, and a custom guide for advisors should be created to better guide their discussions with advisees.




In conclusion, we produced an interactive educational module for aiding students in producing more in-depth ethics statements to meet ABET requirements for BME capstone design reports. Based on the rubric produced, ethics statements created using the interactive guide were superior to those created by groups without the guide and should be used for BME capstone designs more broadly.




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