2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Biomedical engineering is a growing field that plays a key role in addressing challenges in healthcare by creating innovative technologies and solutions, meaning it is critical to ensure that graduates are best prepared for the challenges they may encounter in a professional environment once they have graduated. The transition from developing a strong foundation of conceptual understanding during undergraduate education to applying knowledge to real-world scenarios, particularly upon entering the workforce or pursuing higher education, has been an ongoing concern in the field of biomedical engineering. That said, this work- in- progress (WIP) seeks to understand how students engage in problem-solving by assessing the current role of metacognitive skills. Metacognition entails a person's self-awareness of how they approach thinking and has been identified as a crucial skill set for engineering students to develop while pursuing their education. Metacognitive skills are divided into two primary categories metacognitive knowledge and metacognitive regulation, each consisting of three subcategories (declarative knowledge, procedural knowledge, and conditional knowledge; planning, monitoring, and evaluating respectively). Development of both primary categories is encouraged for student success. Methods to evaluate metacognition for this WIP include qualitative assessments (in-person interviews) of 10% of an undergraduate tissue mechanics course, before the incorporation of pedagogical interventions that will take place in future work. Future directions of this research would entail continued observations of how students use metacognition to approach engineering problems and the incorporation of instructor-guided in-person and digital pedagogical interventions that encourage further development of metacognitive skills. Thus, exploring the relationship between metacognition, conceptual understanding, and student approach to problem solving. This will be accomplished through an increase in the number of participants, a comparison of academic performance through quizzes administered to the class following pedagogical interventions to those from previous years, and additional qualitative assessments (in-person interviews and surveys).