Experiential education is hands-on, real-world learning that can help students develop problem-solving skills, gain practical experience, build relationships, and understand user needs. It can take many forms, including internships, co-ops, research projects, competitive clubs, and service learning [1]. A traditional description of experiential learning as defined by Kolb [2] includes a process where a learner has an experience, reflects on the experience, understands what they have experienced, and then applies what they have learned. Experiential learning can be viewed through a constructivist perspective which describes that the participant builds knowledge on top of previous knowledge through their experience rather than through instructor-mediated content [3]. One of the distinguishing factors in biomedical engineering (BME) is that experiential learning tends to focus on clinical and research experiences.

A survey of the literature makes clear that experiential approaches to biomedical engineering education are abundant, and significant resources have been allocated and expended on experiential learning. These resources include more than $90 million across 347 NIH R25 projects in FY2022 alone, according to NIH RePORTER. Given the frequency with which experiential education is employed and the resources that have been committed in its implementation, one would expect scholarship supporting its efficacy to be similarly abundant. However, there is limited evidence surrounding the efficacy of experiential education, particularly in BME, though there is a growing body of literature on the subject. For example, Hazelwood and Ritter engaged students as participants in a clinical trial as a basis for learning about clinical research [4]. Students demonstrated learning about clinical research, and self-reported increases in motivation. Service learning, such as that provided through Engineering World Health, has been documented for its impacts on competency, commitment, and worldview [5], and, in one instance, correlated with a sizable increase in first-year retention rate and five-year graduation rate [6], likely due to its connections to the desire to help others that has also been cited to draw more women to the field [7]. Clinical immersion is much more commonly reported as a form of experiential learning and has a wide array of potential benefits [8]. Undergraduate research is also commonly shown to support gains in metrics ranging from creativity [9] to technical and communication skills [10]. Interestingly, though BME capstone design experiences often resemble experiential learning in substance, they are rarely reported as such. In fact, experiential education (like research or clinical immersion) is often described as a “feeder” to capstone design.

The breadth of educational experiences that might be called “experiential,” along with the broad landscape of assessments, both qualitative and quantitative, makes it difficult to provide general statements about the efficacy of these experiences and these programs. This is a problem for the study of experiential learning in general [1] and is in no way specific to BME. Yet, rigorous assessment and evaluation are critical in the development of equitable, effective experiential learning.

There is a definitive need for more rigorous research on the effectiveness of experiential learning in BME, as well as on the factors that contribute to its success. Student-reporting alone is insufficient to provide these evaluations. See, for example, the cautionary tale from the NSF Student Science Training Program (a pre-college experiential program), where rigorous assessment suggested that the program itself had minimal impact on student outcomes despite being positively evaluated as student experiences [11, 12]. But what data would be convincing that one or more of the experiential learning activities listed above are worth the resources that we put toward them? What student skills, knowledge bases, or other characteristics do we want to impact with these activities that students cannot achieve in the classroom? Are there validated instruments for those things, and can these instruments serve as a basis for measuring and comparing the efficacy of these varied programs to one another and to “non-experiential” control groups? Perhaps it is first necessary to agree on what constitutes experiential education in the field of BME. For example, are capstone design experiences “experiential learning,” or are they not?

In this Special Issue on Experiential Learning in Biomedical Engineering, we recognize that experiential learning takes a variety of forms that can take place both inside and outside of the curriculum. This compilation represents important steps being taken in Biomedical Engineering Education, illuminating recent and ongoing efforts to define and innovate experiential learning within our discipline and to better understand its efficacy. We, as the Guest Editors of this Special Issue, hope that this will elucidate opportunities and be a launching point to the growing body of knowledge on effective approaches in biomedical engineering experiential education.

Mary M. Staehle, Rachel C. Childers, William H. Guilford

Guest Editors, BIEE Special Issue on Experiential Learning