BME Seminar Series: Dr. Jenny Amos, University of Illinois

Jenny Amos, PhD
Teaching Professor
Bioengineering | The Grainger College of Engineering
Carle Illinois College of Medicine
Educational Psychology | College of Education
University of Illinois

Abstract: 

"Leveraging course-based assessments to track student competency development and inform curricular decision making"

Amos will talk about her department’s NSF RED grant project and the progress made including building a program-wide assessment platform that fuels evidence-based curricular decision making.

Traditional curricula of the 20^th century prioritized math and science, leading to practicing engineers who felt that they spend most of their jobs not “doing engineering”. Over the past decades, we have seen a shift in engineering education to experiences that emphasize practice and demonstration of skills through projects. Additionally, these project-based experiences meet the need from industry for engineers who work in teams, collaborate with other professions, engage in life-long learning activities, and become leaders in their work environment. While this shift from ‘knowing to doing’ is progress, it presents new challenges to academic institutions to monitor and assess these broad skills. Most undergraduates do not get individual feedback beyond graded work and there is no guidance for how a particular skill or knowledge domain is developing over time.

Despite the known need for feedback, the lack of meaningful feedback happens to be one of the biggest challenges that our students face. To address this gap, we will explore an approach to providing individualized feedback on competencies. The talk will walk through development of a BME competency framework, and demonstrate how relevant skill and conceptual knowledge descriptive tags can be introduced into a course through an online assignment grading platform called Gradescope®. In addition, we will show how instructors can then analyze and develop interactive visuals of student and class performance. Further, this data can be used at the program level for program assessment, continuous improvement, and curricular decision making.

Bio: 

Jenny Amos is a Teaching Professor in Bioengineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. She is a AIMBE Fellow, BMES Board of Director Member, ABET Commissioner, two-time Fulbright Specialist in engineering education and has won multiple awards and recognitions for her teaching and scholarship of teaching. Outside of BME, she has also worked to revolutionize the future of graduate medical education serving as a founding member of the new Carle-Illinois College of Medicine, a first-of-its-kind engineering driven college of medicine. Amos is part of the Illinois NSF RED (Revolutionizing Engineering & Computer Science Departments) research team leading efforts to innovate assessment practices for engineering toward producing more holistic engineers. Amos has a decade’s worth of experience leading curriculum reform implementing robust assessment strategies at multiple institutions.