The motivation stems from a fundamental tension in biomedical engineering education. The field spans an enormous breadth of science and engineering domains, from biomechanics to biomaterials to physiological systems, and medical technology evolves so rapidly that any fixed curriculum risks obsolescence. As the authors note, citing classic work by Jonassen and Hernandez-Serrano, novices in school are typically trained only on well-structured, contextualized problems, while problems in everyday and professional contexts are complex and ill-structured. Problem-based learning, or PBL, borrowed from medical education, addresses this gap by placing students in teams around open-ended, real-world challenges and asking them to construct knowledge themselves rather than receive it passively from a lecturer.

In a traditional PBL implementation, the facilitator is not a content expert dispensing answers but an expert learner who models effective strategies for inquiry and group dynamics. Facilitators probe student reasoning with questions such as: What is the evidence for your statement? Where did you find this information? How reliable is it? They promote deep engagement with the problem, support shared regulation and self-directed learning by encouraging students to recognize what they do not know, and cultivate productive group dynamics by monitoring interactions and validating contributions. The problem is that this role, done well, requires substantial time, effort and institutional buy-in, particularly at large research universities where a dedicated facilitator for every team in every course is logistically cumbersome.

The Virginia Tech solution was elegantly simple. Faculty members, postdoctoral researchers, graduate students and clinicians were recruited as volunteer facilitators, each attending only one to three 75-minute class periods. Each class session was divided into three 20-minute facilitation periods, with three to five facilitators rotating among different student teams. Over a semester, each team experienced approximately six to eight total facilitation periods spread across the course’s open-ended problems. A week before their assigned session, facilitators received a summary guide of Barrows’ The Tutorial Process, the problem statement, deliverable descriptions, assessment rubrics and team rosters, a lightweight preparation package designed to minimize the burden while maximizing effectiveness.

The course itself, a three-credit requirement for the biomedical engineering major and minor, was redesigned around adapted frameworks from Newstetter and from Clyne and Billiar. Teams of four to five students, assembled using the validated CATME Team Maker tool, tackled an introductory reverse-engineering problem involving common medical devices such as pulse oximeters and blood glucose monitors, followed by two open-ended problems inspired by challenge areas identified by the National Institutes of Health, including pediatric device labeling, glioblastoma treatment and organ transplantation. One open-ended problem emphasized the engineering design process and experimental design; the other focused on mathematical modeling. Each problem unfolded through intermittent individual and team deliverables culminating in a final written and oral product, with mini-lectures on target skills such as reading scientific articles woven in between.

A crucial structural innovation was the Executive Summary. At the start of each facilitation period, one team member delivered a one-to-two-minute verbal briefing defining the problem, summarizing the team’s progress and outlining future plans. Facilitators scored this summary using a rubric assessing communication skills and overall team functioning. The researchers believe this mechanism passively enforced individual accountability and was one of the main drivers of the course’s success, since every student had to be prepared to explain and defend the team’s work at any moment. Team meeting minutes and CATME peer evaluations provided additional layers of accountability, though students rated the meeting minutes as the least helpful of these mechanisms.

The study collected data from the Fall 2020 offering with 53 students and 26 facilitators and the Spring 2021 offering with 71 students and 22 facilitators, both taught online due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Using an explanatory sequential mixed-methods design, the team first gathered quantitative survey data and then followed up with open-ended questions analyzed thematically. The results were largely encouraging. Students rated their ability to collaborate effectively within a team highest, with a mean of 3.88 on a four-point scale, while ratings for evaluating and applying mathematical modeling and identifying safety and ethics committees were lower at 3.08, partly reflecting that those outcomes were tied to specific problems. Facilitators were similarly positive, with 88 and 95 percent rating teamwork and communication outcomes as good or excellent.

Perceptions of the rotating model itself revealed both enthusiasm and friction. Roughly 64 to 66 percent of students agreed that rotating facilitators contributed to their individual and team success, with mean agreement scores of 3.76 and 3.81 on a five-point scale. Yet a majority, 56.7 percent, also found the rotations challenging for their individual experience, and half found them challenging for their team, a reaction the authors attribute to unfamiliarity with non-traditional pedagogy. On the facilitator side, 88 percent agreed the rotational model benefited student learning, and 97.7 percent found the time commitment acceptable. Notably, despite the online format, 84 percent of students reported they could engage during Zoom-based facilitation sessions, and facilitators reported that students were often more willing to turn cameras on in small breakout groups than in the main virtual classroom.

Thematic analysis surfaced four key patterns: engagement, knowledge sharing, expectations and the value of rotating facilitation. Students appreciated facilitators who asked probing questions and shared specialized expertise, with one noting that different professors brought knowledge of FDA processes, vascularization and research tools. Facilitators valued meeting multiple teams and offering diverse perspectives, with one observing that more facilitators probing questions can breach the boundaries of a team’s knowledge in more places. The friction centered on mismatched expectations: some students encountered facilitators who seemed unprepared or whose guidance felt too high-level, while some facilitators found teams poorly prepared or Executive Summaries inconsistently delivered. The authors argue this transparency problem, how PBL is communicated to both students and facilitators, deserves far more research attention.

The implications reach beyond a single course. The study demonstrates feasibility rather than definitive effectiveness, lacking a concurrent comparison group and drawing participants from a single department during a pandemic-era online format. Still, the model offers a compelling template for institutions where staffing constraints have made rigorous PBL impractical, and the authors suggest future work should compare rotating and dedicated facilitator models directly, develop frameworks for selecting appropriate open-ended problems, and conduct longitudinal studies tracking how introductory PBL shapes professional skills across the curriculum. For a field that must prepare undergraduates for the relentless pace of medical technology, a facilitation model that trades semester-long commitments for a few well-prepared hours may be the pragmatic unlock that brings deep, active learning to the students who need it most.

Subject of Research: A rotating facilitator model for problem-based learning in an introductory biomedical engineering course

Article Title: Implementation of a Rotating Facilitator Model of Problem-Based Learning in an Introductory Biomedical Engineering Course

Article References: Chowdhury, T., Walker, L. B., Muelenaer, A., Arena, C. B., Murzi, H., & Arena, S. L. (2026). Implementation of a Rotating Facilitator Model of Problem-Based Learning in an Introductory Biomedical Engineering Course. Biomedical Engineering Education. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43683-026-00252-7

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43683-026-00252-7

Keywords: problem-based learning, biomedical engineering education, rotating facilitators, student engagement, engineering pedagogy, teamwork, facilitation, active learning, undergraduate education, mixed methods, Virginia Tech, curriculum design

The research, conducted by Ariana F. Turner and Joseph M. LeDoux of the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University, examined how former students of a course called The Art of Telling Your Story described its impact on their development. The investigators carried out semi-structured interviews with sixteen former students and analyzed the transcripts using inductive, reflexive thematic analysis, a qualitative method in which researchers code data without predetermined hypotheses and build themes from recurring patterns in participants’ own words. The analysis uncovered nine distinct themes: Person-Focused, Identity with the subthemes Reflection and Exploration and Growth and Self-Discovery, Self-Integration, Vulnerability, Connection, Empathy, Application Skills, and Career Development.

The rationale for the work rests on a tension at the heart of engineering education. Biomedical engineering is unusual among engineering disciplines because it is organized around medical problems, clinical settings, and patient needs, which makes empathy, patient-centeredness, and attention to lived experience especially relevant to professional formation. Yet engineering curricula have traditionally emphasized technical competencies far more explicitly than interpersonal or intrapersonal development. National reports, including the National Academy of Engineering’s Educating the Engineer of 2020 and the National Academies’ Education for Life and Work, have called for curricula that better develop cognitive, intrapersonal, and interpersonal competencies, and research by Marcia Baxter Magolda on young adult development suggests that growth across these domains is necessary for students to achieve self-authorship, the capacity to internally define their own beliefs, values, identity, and relationships.

The course at the center of the study was a one-credit requirement that met weekly for two hours and drew students from across the biomedical engineering program, most commonly in the third or fourth year. In each session, students responded to a prompt by writing and sharing a personal story and then gave feedback on one another’s stories. Prompts asked them to reflect on childhood memories, peak experiences, failure, leadership, persuasive storytelling, their beliefs and passions, and their imagined future selves. The semester concluded with an About Me presentation in which each student pulled the semester’s work into a single coherent story of who they are. Crucially, students were never required or pressured to share stories they did not wish to share. The course had been offered in several versions over roughly two years, both online and in person, but the core cycle of drafting, sharing, and responding remained constant.

The interview sample consisted of sixteen former students between 18 and 23 years old, three quarters of whom identified as female. The researchers compared the sample with the full course population of 532 students through Spring 2024 and found no statistically significant differences in gender or race and ethnicity, although interviewees were on average slightly younger. Participants had completed the course an average of about six months before their interviews, with intervals ranging from the same semester to roughly two years. Interviews, conducted over Zoom and lasting an average of about twenty-one minutes, followed the same eight questions for every participant. The two coders independently read and coded all sixteen transcripts, generating roughly twenty-two initial codes, then met eight times to refine the themes through discussion until consensus was reached.

The most prevalent theme, appearing in 88 percent of interviews, was Identity. Participants described the course as supporting reflection on and clarification of their sense of self. One student explained that hearing classmates’ perspectives prompted deeper thinking about their own inner motivations, and that the course helped them realign their reasons for choosing biomedical engineering. Rather than simply liking engineering and wanting to help people, the student reflected on why helping people brought them joy and energy, a process the authors link to autobiographical reasoning, the capacity that narrative identity researchers such as Dan McAdams identify as central to how emerging adults construct a coherent sense of self. A subtheme called Growth and Self-Discovery captured students who entered the class shy or timid and left with greater confidence in expressing who they were as students, as engineers, and as human beings in society.

The theme of Person-Focused learning, present in half of the interviews, described how the course invited students to engage as whole people rather than solely as engineers. One participant argued that the ultimate goal of college is to help students become people ready to contribute as active citizens, something the relentless grind of exams and technical content can obscure. For students from historically marginalized backgrounds, the effect could be especially powerful. One first-generation, minority woman in STEM described feeling validated in a space where her story was declared appropriate, professional, and worth telling, noting that while she lacked internships or co-ops, the multiple part-time jobs she worked to get through school mattered too. A related theme, Self-Integration, described in a quarter of interviews, captured students weaving different facets of identity, such as an advocacy role and an engineering role, into a coherent whole that they could present in graduate school applications.

Interpersonal themes emerged because students shared their stories with one another rather than reflecting privately. Vulnerability, reported by 37 percent of participants, described a shift away from the guardedness that prior research suggests engineering culture encourages, where students may project confidence rather than reveal struggle. One student said the course taught them that it is acceptable to be vulnerable through a story and that vulnerability actually deepens connection. Connection, the most common interpersonal theme at 68 percent prevalence, described students bonding as people rather than over shared academic stress. Empathy, at 37 percent, captured students learning to listen better; one participant described learning about a classmate’s father’s death and another’s battle with cancer, experiences they would never have encountered in ordinary coursework.

The professional themes demonstrated that this personal work translated directly into career outcomes. Application Skills, present in 62 percent of interviews, described how the essay fragments and narrative techniques developed in the course became raw material for job, fellowship, and medical school applications. One student pursuing medicine described the course as perfectly timed, teaching them to convey a story within the constraints of word counts and topics while remaining effective, adding that their future depended on it. Career Development, at 50 percent prevalence, went further: one student discovered through their own stories that their deepest motivation was teaching and design rather than medicine, and redirected their graduate applications accordingly, describing a new trust in their own ability to shape their career.

The authors interpret these findings through narrative identity theory, which holds that people construct an internalized, evolving life story connecting their reconstructed past, experienced present, and imagined future. The nine themes grouped into three categories, self-authorship, interpersonal connections, and professional development, align closely with that account, and the researchers note that story-driven learning appears to scaffold exactly the kind of autobiographical meaning-making that emerges in early adulthood. The team acknowledges important limitations: sixteen participants is exploratory, recruitment deliberately targeted highly engaged former students, and the authors themselves taught the course, a positionality they addressed transparently, with the corresponding author excluded from coding. Future work will test the findings with larger samples, examine outcomes across all students including the less engaged, and investigate whether narrative identity itself changes measurably. For now, the study offers a strikingly low-cost prescription: a weekly two-hour course with no prerequisites, in which students craft and share their lives, may help engineers become not just technically skilled professionals, but people prepared to care for the patients their devices will one day serve.

Subject of Research: How a required story-driven learning course shapes the personal and professional development of biomedical engineering students.

Article Title: Person-Focused Pedagogy: A Qualitative Exploration of How Story-Driven Learning Shapes Students’ Personal and Professional Development

Article References: Turner, A. F., & LeDoux, J. M. (2026). Person-Focused Pedagogy: A Qualitative Exploration of How Story-Driven Learning Shapes Students’ Personal and Professional Development. Biomedical Engineering Education. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43683-026-00248-3

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43683-026-00248-3

Keywords: biomedical engineering education, story-driven learning, narrative identity, qualitative research, empathy, self-authorship, vulnerability, career development, engineering pedagogy, student development, higher education, thematic analysis