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Assessing students' integrative learning in biomedical engineering from the perspectives of structure, behavior, and function

Learning in biomedical engineering is highly interdisciplinary: students need to integrate concepts between engineering and life sciences, and be able to design and develop technologies with physiological considerations. In this study, biomedical engineering students' artifacts were analyzed in detail according to the structure-behavior-framework (SBF) framework. The SBF framework has been investigated by educational researchers and learning scientists; in particular, the behavioral and functional dimensions were proved to be related to a sophisticated level of understanding of complex systems. Existing research results also indicate that experts (or expert-like learners) show a deeper understanding of the behavioral and functional aspects of systems. In the current study, a 5-level scale comprising structural, behavioral, and functional dimensions of integrated learning was constructed to assess student learning in a biomedical engineering project course. Our results indicate that high achievers and low achievers were different in the behavioral and functional dimensions. The results also indicate significant relationships between behavioral and functional dimensions of learning and students' final course performance. These findings align with existing results in cognitive science and learning sciences on expert-novice differences, which help connecting engineering educational inquiries to the rich body of literature and findings in human learning.