Development of an Interactive Guide Aiding Senior Capstone Project Students in Ethical Analysis

Cullen, Elizabeth; Mastriani, Isabella; Finberg, Eleanor; Johnson, Taylor

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Development of an Interactive Guide Aiding Senior Capstone Project Students in Ethical Analysis

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At Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI), the completion of a Senior Capstone Project is mandatory for undergraduate Biomedical Engineering (BME) students. The project plays a crucial role in addressing and assessing ethics and healthcare disparities within the BME curriculum, however, there is no sustainable approach to guide students in completing the ethics component of their project. To address this issue, we developed an interactive guide that was integrated into the Canvas learning management system (LMS). The interactive guide consisted of modules aimed to guide BME students in writing a complete ethics statement that identifies and mitigates ethical concerns related to their capstone major-qualifying project (MQP). The interactive guide was pilot-tested and iterated based on feedback from participating students and advisors, and then implemented for all MQP groups to use. We also developed a rubric to score previous MQP ethics statements and compare them to ethics statements created using our interactive guide. The rubric scores of ethics statements improved significantly in groups that used the interactive guide. Furthermore, feedback received from students in surveys indicated that the interactive guide was successful in guiding students to consider ethics and healthcare disparities in relation to their project. Based on these findings, we recommend the interactive guide as a sustainable and permanent solution to better prepare students to identify and mitigate ethical concerns related to their projects.

This report represents the work of one or more WPI undergraduate students submitted to the faculty as evidence of completion of a degree requirement. WPI routinely publishes these reports on its website without editorial or peer review.

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