Interdisciplinary Faculty Team Research Articles

Emotional preparedness for human body donor dissection in premedical education: A pilot program evaluation.

Dissection of bodies provided by donors continues to be utilized as a critical part of medical education. It also represents a rite of passage that socializes students to prepare them for the stress that comes with working in a clinical environment as a medical professional. Just as proper guidance in acquiring technical skills is critical in anatomy education, there is an important need for proper emotional guidance throughout the human dissection process. A pilot curriculum was developed by an interdisciplinary faculty team to emotionally prepare students for their first visit to the anatomy laboratory. Students were first-year foundation premedical students who had expressed an interest in visiting the laboratory. Pre- and post-visit surveys were conducted to explore students' emotional responses to a first visit to the anatomy laboratory and their utilization of coping strategies. The survey findings show an overwhelming favorable feeling in anticipation of the human gross anatomy laboratory visit. About 20% of the students experienced anxiety at the anticipation of the laboratory visit, but only 5.3% experienced anxiety during the visit. The decrease in the number of students experiencing anxiety may be attributed to the interventions introduced before and during the visit. Talking with a close friend was the main coping strategy utilized by 63% of students experiencing fear or anxiety during and after the laboratory visit. The findings from this program evaluation provide a better understanding of student emotional preparedness and utilization of coping strategies, which may help prepare and guide future students for the dissection experience.

Entangled Co-Design with a Trickster: Speculative Framing and Reframing

Speculative design, as a diverse set of methods that aim to offer critique, can be challenging to engage productively. In this design case, we share how a prior, stalled design project—an ambitious vision of interdisciplinary design education partnered with business and housing development projects in Santa Fe, New Mexico—provided compelling precedent as we sought to reframe during the COVID-19 pandemic. We recognized that solution-focused ways of working in the prior project left the design problem undefined. As we began the design work detailed in this case, we leveraged the perspectives and design knowledge of our interdisciplinary team of faculty and students. While design cases often emphasize the designed training or program, we focus on our reframing process, sharing vignettes as we prepared to and participated in activities at a design workshop, and then used our own design practices to engage in problem framing workshops. In sharing these accounts, we characterize the pandemic as a trickster and speculative co-designer, who revealed much about how our efforts were entangled with institutional structures. Across these punctuated vignettes of design work, we highlight how an initial broad problem frame invited this trickster to participate and how the application of problem framing tools wrested framing agency from the trickster. Collectively, this anchored our attention to systemic inequities in ways that troubled notions of sustainability.

A Visionary Approach to Advancing Sea Level Rise Adaptation in an Urban Coastal Community, Waikīkī, Hawai‘i

In Hawai‘i, a $19 billion loss is anticipated due to the 3.2 feet (1 meter) of global sea level rise (SLR) predicted earlier this century to occur by 2100, while, in fact, 3 to 4 feet (.9 to 1.2 meters) of SLR by 2100 are now estimated as a mid-range scenario (HSCC, 2022). In Waikīkī, the economic hub of Hawai‘i’s tourism industry, future flooding caused by SLR, groundwater inundation, king tides, rainfall, and storm surge are projected to become a chronic disruption by mid-century (Habel et al., 2017, 2020). In contrast to retreat, one approach to managing SLR in dense urban areas, such as Waikīkī, is to consider an “in-place” flood adaptation or accommodation strategy. An interdisciplinary team of faculty and students at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa are merging science with design to create conceptual urban and architectural design renderings in order to visualize SLR adaptation strategies over time for buildings, utilities, transportation, and open space. Through iterative, structured public outreach, this research provides designers, planners, and policymakers with valuable insights into a diverse group of stakeholders’ preferences and their comments on each adaptation strategy. It supports the resilient planning goals outlined by the state, the City and County of Honolulu, and also the Waikīkī Special District Guidelines (DPP, 2021). In addition, through coursework and employment, students are learning how they might address SLR in their future careers.

Sustaining the Academic Pipeline: A Professional Development Workshop Series for Academics of Color

Land-grant institutions were designed to improve the lives of individuals and communities by removing barriers to education. However, despite years of effort to address the lack of scholars of color at these institutions, disparities have persisted. Many graduate students and faculty of color have reported that the workshops meant to diversify academia at their institutions did not speak to their unique experiences or challenges. Ultimately, this contributed to their decision to be less engaged in their institutions or leave academia. Using components of the Kirkpatrick model of evaluation (Kirkpatrick, 2007), the authors evaluate a professional development workshop series created by an interdisciplinary team of Black women faculty and staff at a historically white, land-grant, research 1 (R1) university in the Midwest. This series was designed to address the unique experiences of scholars of color. Six graduate students and two faculty members evaluated the workshop series through semi-structured qualitative interviews. Participants describe their decision-making processes to come to a historically white institution, their mentoring experiences, and the impact of a lack of diverse peers and feelings of isolation. Implications for evaluation and practice are discussed.

Student responses to creative coding in biomedical science education.

Biomedical science students need to learn to code. Graduates face a future where they will be better prepared for research higher degrees and the workforce if they can code. Embedding coding in a biomedical curriculum comes with challenges. First, biomedical science students often experience anxiety learning quantitative and computational thinking skills and second biomedical faculty often lack expertise required to teach coding. In this study, we describe a creative coding approach to building coding skills in students using the packages of Processing and Arduino. Biomedical science students were taught by an interdisciplinary faculty team from Medicine and Health, Science and Architecture, Design and Planning. We describe quantitative and qualitative responses of students to this approach. Cluster analysis revealed a diversity of student responses, with a large majority of students who supported creative coding in the curriculum, a smaller but vocal cluster, who did not support creative coding because either the exercises were not sufficiently challenging or were too challenging and believed coding should not be in a Biomedical Science curriculum. We describe how two creative coding platforms, Processing and Arduino, embedded and used to visualize human physiological data, and provide responses to students, including those minority of students, who are opposed to coding in the curriculum This study found a variety of students responses in a final year capstone course of an undergraduate Biomedical Science degree where future pathways for students are either in research higher degrees or to the workforce with a future which will be increasingly data driven.

Editorial Commentary

Editorial Commentary

Effective Practices for High Performing Interdisciplinary Faculty Teams

Interdisciplinary teaching by teams of diverse faculty is highly effective in providing students with intellectual tools for creating innovative solutions to 21st century problems. This article examines the effective practices for interdisciplinary teaching used by a five-membered, disciplinarily diverse faculty team with expertise in chemistry, design, education, and business/psychology. The team found convergence, reaching a common understanding of information through discussion, to be more important, and difficult, than conveyance, sharing new information. The influence of convergence and conveyance on the faculty team impacted their team dynamic and their content delivery, encouraging similar characteristics from their students. A collaborative case study approach, augmented with interviews and meeting notes, provide the qualitative data from which best practices for fostering an effective interdisciplinary faculty team in higher education are identified. The findings reveal the importance of, and processes for, balancing individual and team priorities within the broad areas of convergence and conveyance: recognizing intrinsic rewards, maintaining a shared focus, developing a team mindset, translating ideas across disciplines, and proactively working on good team practices. The article addresses the dearth of research on the effective practices of interdisciplinary teams in higher education concluding with practical examples and strategies for high performing faculty teams.

From “a great counter attraction to the ale-house and low music hall” to “the one place everybody goes”

Canadian public libraries espouse a set of values that may not be congruent (e.g., preserving “high” culture vs providing access to inclusive collections). Tension or conflict can result when stakeholders emphasize different values, so it is crucial to attend to values in stakeholder accounts, including those in the mass media. This poster presents a) emerging findings from a study of the representation of public libraries in The Globe and Mail since 1860; and b) reflections on the research and research communication process as an innovative experiential learning opportunity for the interdisciplinary team of faculty, graduate, and undergraduate students.

Experimental Biology 2020 Meeting Abstracts.

NYU School of Medicine recently embarked on a re-design of its anatomy curriculum that decreased the use of cadavers with plastinated specimens. Plastinated models provide an authentic learning experience of the human body, but lack necessary labels outlining important structures. Due to the fragile nature of the specimens, we endeavored to solve the challenge of labeling by developing a digitized supplement and archive of plastinated and pathology specimens. An interdisciplinary team of faculty and multimedia designers at NYU School of Medicine designed and developed electronic resources related to the artistic models and plastinated specimens. Over the course of three months, 60 artistic and plastinated models of different sizes were captured from dozens of angles using a digital camera or an Artec Leo Scanner. The numerous image captures of the plastinated specimens were processed in Agisoft Metashape, a stand-alone software product, that performs photogrammetric processing of digital images and generates 3D spatial data. After Agisoft Metashape exported a complex 3D mesh with a high-resolution texture, anatomy faculty added labels to the digitized 3D anatomy specimens using the Sketchfab web platform. The labeled 3D anatomy models were then uploaded into the Living Anatomy site on NYU School of Medicine's learning management system for students to explore before, during, and after their anatomy lab sessions. Quizzes using these models also were created to help students identify the structures and link them to physiology and clinical scenarios. The digitized 3D models allow students to zoom in, rotate and explore the specimens in a more interactive way, thereby enhancing the process of just observing fragile plastination models. When asked, 84% of students reported that the 3D models of plastinated specimens contributed "very much so" to their learning of anatomical relationships. We will continue to find opportunities for the meaningful integration of these 3D models within the anatomy curriculum as well as into other pre-clerkship and clerkship modules. We will also assess the educational outcomes of the 3D models and, by doing so, will incorporate instructional design into the process.

Student evaluation in orthoptics: evaluation of rubric-based assessments from interdisciplinary team of faculty

Student evaluation in orthoptics: evaluation of rubric-based assessments from interdisciplinary team of faculty

The value of long‐term data in agricultural systems

The value of long‐term data in agricultural systems

Design of a solar tracking interactive kiosk

A two-axis solar tracker and its interactive kiosk were designed by an interdisciplinary team of students and faculty. The objective was to develop a publicly accessible kiosk that would facilitate the study of energy usage and production on campus. Tracking is accomplished by an open-loop algorithm, microcontroller, and ham radio rotator. Solar panel output is monitored in real time and displayed to the public with lights and digits that can be read by the casual passersby. While maximum power point tracking is the most accurate means of quantifying the output power of a photovoltaic panel, simplicity and design constraints dictated the use of short-circuit current as a proxy for power. A touchscreen display allows kiosk visitors to compare two solar panels, an automatic tracker that faces the sun, and an identical panel whose elevation and azimuth can be controlled with a virtual joystick. This project was a capstone experience for students in physics/engineering, computer science, and instructional technology. We discuss technical challenges and design choices, as well as the educational goals of the kiosk.

Gaming the System: Developing an Educational Game for Securing Principles of Arterial Blood Gases.

This article describes the development process for creating a digital educational mini game prototype designed to provide practice opportunities for learning fundamental principles of arterial blood gases. Mini games generally take less than an hour to play and focus on specific subject matter. An interdisciplinary team of faculty from two universities mentored student game developers to design a digital educational mini game prototype. Sixteen accelerated bachelor of science in nursing students collaborated with game development students and playtested the game prototype during the last semester of their senior year in nursing school. Playtesting is a form of feedback that supports an iterative design process that is critical to game development. A 10-question survey was coupled with group discussions addressing five broad themes of an archetypical digital educational mini game to yield feedback on game design, play, and content. Four rounds of playtesting and incorporating feedback supported the iterative process. Accelerated bachelor of science in nursing student playtester feedback suggests that the digital educational mini game prototype has potential for offering an engaging, playful game experience that will support securing the fundamental principles of arterial blood gases. Next steps are to test the digital educational mini game for teaching and learning effectiveness.

Development of a Novel Interprofessional Education Activity with Undergraduate Students: Design, Assessment, and Lessons Learned

INTRODUCTION Interprofessional education (IPE) is essential for students in healthcare disciplines to learn skills necessary for collaborative patient care. While IPE is an essential component of health professional training, implementation is challenging. Faculty members from pharmacy, nursing, exercise physiology, and medical laboratory science at a rural, private university developed an IPE activity with the goal of exposing students to interprofessional care. The process of IPE activity development will also be described. METHODS Using a pretest/posttest method, data were collected from two student cohorts (n=411) from four disciplines using the Readiness for Interprofessional Learning Scale (RIPLS). Students worked multidisciplinary teams (n=66) to assess patient cases and design a treatment plan. Responses were evaluated using a common rubric. Student feedback on the activity was also gathered after the activity. RESULTS Students were positively influenced by the exercise. Ten items on the RIPLS had statistically significant differences between pretest and posttest. Students (90.5%) identified the activity improved their understanding of other healthcare disciplines and roles, and 89.7% agreed the activity made them more aware of cultural competency. Common themes of gaining appreciation of teamwork, collaboration to improve patient care, and learning across disciplines emerged from student feedback. Student performance was consistent with academic progression. CONCLUSION IPE activities improved student readiness for interprofessional learning, produced case responses reflective of interprofessional collaboration, and were viewed positively by students. Faculty were able to identify solutions to challenges identified during project implementation providing support for future activities and a template for others developing IPE activities. Received: 01/12/2016 Accepted: 02/26/2016 © 2016 Musser et al. This open access article is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution License, which allows unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. H IP & Development of a Novel Interprofessional Education Activity with Undergraduate Students ORIGINAL THEORY & RESEARCH 2(4):eP1096 | 2 Introduction The health care game is changing. Is your team ready? Competent health professionals are required to work together in complex and dynamic healthcare environments and to collaborate in teams (Hood, Cant, Baulch, Gilbee, Leech, Anderson, & Davies, 2014). Each team member must have clear understanding of the roles and responsibilities of each discipline and have an understanding of how each team member contributes to patient care (Gillen, Arora, Sanderson, & Turner, 2013). To assist students in developing this understanding, many universities and health care programs have incorporated interprofessional education (IPE) activities into their curriculum. IPE occurs when two or more professions learn about, from, and with each other to enable effective collaboration and improve health outcomes (World Health Organization, 2010). For many, effective collaboration is a learned skill. Members of the healthcare team must practice this skill just as a baseball player practices batting or a basketball team practices offense. While some find this difficult, time consuming, and even counterproductive, practice makes perfect. For undergraduate students to be practice-ready upon graduation, they need knowledge about the principles of good teamwork, to have experienced interprofessional collaboration, and to have been part of a well-functioning health care team (McKinlay, Pullon, & Murdoch, 2014). Exposing future healthcare professionals to IPE at the undergraduate level allows students to develop, practice, and perfect their collaborative skills within a safe and supportive learning environment. At a private, rural Midwestern university, an interdisciplinary team of faculty from pharmacy, nursing, exercise physiology, and medical laboratory science (MLS) worked together to develop and implement activities for students to work collaboratively through cultural healthcare cases. Goals for the activities included exposing students to other healthcare disciplines, improving curricular connectivity, and practicing communication and decision making within teams. The IPE activity was assessed to determine 1) students’ readiness for IPE before and after the exercise using the Readiness for Interprofessional Learning Scale (RIPLS); 2) student perceptions about the activity; 3) students’ performance on the case. Provided as a template for IPE developers, this article also discusses activity design and lessons learned during the implementation process.

Interprofessional Integrative Medicine Training for Preventive Medicine Residents.

Integrative medicine training was incorporated into the Rutgers New Jersey Medical School Preventive Medicine residency at the Rutgers Biomedical and Health Sciences Newark Campus as a collaboration between the Rutgers New Jersey Medical School and the School of Health Related Professions. Beginning in 2012, an interdisciplinary faculty team organized an Integrative Medicine program in a Preventive Medicine residency that leveraged existing resources across Rutgers Biomedical and Health Sciences. The overarching aim of the programs was to introduce residents and faculty to the scope and practice of integrative medicine in the surrounding Newark community and explore evidence-based research on integrative medicine. The faculty team tapped into an interprofessional network of healthcare providers to organize rotations for the preventive medicine residents that reflected the unique nature of integrative medicine in the greater Newark area. Residents provided direct care as part of interdisciplinary teams at clinical affiliates and shadowed health professionals from diverse disciplines as they filled different roles in providing patient care. The residents also participated in research projects. A combination of formal and informal programs on integrative medicine topics was offered to residents and faculty. The Integrative Medicine program, which ran from 2013 through 2014, was successful in exposing residents and faculty to the unique nature of integrative medicine across professions in the community served by Rutgers Biomedical and Health Sciences.

Developing a Culture of Learning Around the edTPA: One University’s Journey

In this article, we discuss how an interdisciplinary faculty team at a midsized public university created supports for the Teacher Performance Assessment (edTPA), a high-stakes performance assessment for preservice candidates being adopted by many states. We provide a general description of our work in contending with the challenge of developing a culture of learning around edTPA and share how we have constructed a program that builds an “ethos” around the goals of edTPA, its vision of ambitious, and learner-supported teaching and situates this work within the larger values and ideas of our teacher-education program. The article includes a conceptual framework for how a teacher-education program can support candidates’ success on edTPA while maintaining a focus on ambitious teaching.

Embedding Multiple Literacies into STEM Curricula

In fall 2012, an interdisciplinary team of science, English, and library faculty embedded reading, writing, and information literacy strategies in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) curricula as a first step in improving student learning and retention in science courses and aligning them with the Next Generation Science and Common Core State Standards. The authors present their reading, writing, and information literacy contributions, explaining the importance of introducing these concepts and strategies into science courses.

The Interdisciplinary Curriculum for Oncology Palliative Care Education (iCOPE): meeting the challenge of interprofessional education.

Background: Interprofessional education is necessary to prepare students of the health professions for successful practice in today's health care environment. Because of its expertise in interdisciplinary practice and team-based care, palliative care should be leading the way in creating educational opportunities for students to learn the skills for team practice and provision of quality patient-centered care. Multiple barriers exist that can discourage those desiring to create and implement truly interdisciplinary curriculum. An interdisciplinary faculty team planned and piloted a mandatory interdisciplinary palliative oncology curriculum and responded to formative feedback. The project took place at a large public metropolitan university. Medical, nursing, and social work students and chaplains completing a clinical pastoral education internship participated in the curriculum. Formative feedback was received via the consultation of an interdisciplinary group of palliative education experts, focus groups from students, and student evaluations of each learning modality. Multiple barriers were experienced and successfully addressed by the faculty team. Curricular components were redesigned based on formative feedback. Openness to this feedback coupled with flexibility and compromise enabled the faculty team to create an efficient, sustainable, and feasible interdisciplinary palliative oncology curriculum. Interdisciplinary palliative education can be successful if faculty teams are willing to confront challenges, accept feedback on multiple levels, and compromise while maintaining focus on desired learner outcomes.

Integrated Design Pedagogy for Energy Efficient Design: Tools for Teaching Carbon Neutral Building Design

Among all human activities contributing to climate change, the construction and operation of buildings is among the most energy, pollution, and resource intensive. Building and construction activities consume significant amounts of raw materials each year. Materials utilized in buildings have high-embodied energy, high-embodied emissions, and high levels of toxins and pollutants at the end of their production. Given the size of the building industry and its impact on the environment, educational practices that help future professionals in building design and construction to understand how to minimize the adverse impacts of buildings on the environment is paramount. The following paper presents the outcomes from a funded project by the U.S. Department of Education that supported an interdisciplinary team of faculty to develop and produce an educational platform comprised of software and a hard copy textbook developed for advancing climate responsive and energy efficient building design. The paper will discuss and present the project, the pedagogical principals and the testing results.

Development of a questionnaire to assess health profession students’ knowledge of older adults

ObjectiveThe objectives of this study were twofold: to develop and psychometrically test a questionnaire to measure health profession students’ knowledge of aging in older adults and to assess comparative professional geriatric knowledge in pharmacy, nursing, and physician assistant (PA) students. DesignAn interdisciplinary team of faculty with clinical geriatric expertise and experience in item scale development designed a scale, termed the Geriatric Knowledge Assessment Scale (GKAS), to measure health profession students’ geriatric knowledge in the areas of aging disease, physical activity, drug therapy, and nutrition. Upon development of the scale, the psychometric properties of the GKAS were analyzed. The tool was administered to pharmacy, nursing, and PA students in the final semester of their professional education programs. ResultsA total of 412 students participated in the test and 408 completed the questionnaire with health profession responses as follows: pharmacy students (n = 159), nursing students (n = 162), and PA students (n = 87). PA students scored at a significantly higher level on the GKAS than both pharmacy and nursing students (p < 0.001), and pharmacy students scored significantly higher than nursing students (p = 0.05). Overall, 65% of students agreed or strongly agreed on a five-point Likert scale that the gerontological content in their professional education adequately prepared them to address the health care needs of older adults. ConclusionFurther research and utilization of the GKAS in geriatric health care education is required. Our findings also support ongoing evaluation of geriatrics education and training within all health professions.