2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Tissue engineering involves the design, construction and characterization of tissue constructs to model tissue function or to be used as a regenerative medicine therapeutic. Often, in tissue engineering laboratory courses, much emphasis is given to biomaterial synthesis, biomechanics, and biotransport with little focus on quality assessment of tissue constructs. Thus, we developed a theory, design, and analysis (TDA) framework to provide undergraduate students more practice in tissue characterization. The framework involves structuring a multi-week lab that integrates theoretical foundations, bioinstrumentation background, experimental design and data analysis. The goal of the framework is to enhance lab-based learning by providing opportunities for students to incorporate multiple levels of Blooms Taxonomy. By consolidating these opportunities into a multi-week module, we hypothesized, that students would experience more reinforcement and thus comfortability with these experimental methods. For this study, we focused on the development of a TDA module to measure apoptosis in tissue constructs using real-time, reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR). Before deployment of this module, students were presented with a Likert survey (5-point scale with 1 being strongly disagree and 5 being strongly agree) to gauge their comfortability with experimental techniques, experimental design, data analysis, and their ability to describe apoptotic mechanisms. Students then participated in a series of “wet” and “dry” lab exercises to promote TDA competency in tissue characterization by real-time RT-PCR. Afterwards, students completed a post-lab Likert survey to assess outcomes. Based on our analysis, students expressed enhanced comfortability in performing real-time RT-PCR (2.9 vs. 4.1, p < 0.01), analyzing gene-expression data (3.1 vs. 3.9, p < 0.05) and explaining the mechanisms of apoptosis (3.3 vs. 4.1, p < 0.01) after completing the TDA module. Given these results, we have expanded the use of TDA modules in this course to promote comfortability with other experimental methods used in tissue engineering including flow cytometry and rheometery.