An In-Situ Professional Concieve-Design-Experience in an Interdisciplinary Context: Engineering Students in Chemical Biology Present Research Plans to Medical Doctors

A major part of the professional role for many of our Bioengineering students will be to be able to explain background and suggest strategies for professionals with other specialities. Thus, the students will need to confidently be able to enter the role as experts in their field. However, in university learning, the students are used to the teacher being the expert, which hinders them to act in this role. To redeem this, we have developed a novel way of examination, where the students are indeed the experts, and the examiner is a professional of a related field. The aim is to encourage the students to confidently enter the expert role by putting them in a situation where they have to explain their expert knowledge in a way understandable by non-experts. The interdisciplinary environment in which the examination takes place serves as an additional motivating factor, which also encourages higher-order cognitive learning.

2nd International CDIO Conference, Linköping University, Linköping, Sweden, 13 – 14 June 2006