Establishing a Rubric to Assess Students’ Empathy Development Using Artifacts from Biomedical Engineering Courses

This research full paper describes the development of a rubric to assess students’ empathy through their coursework. Engineering departments are increasingly striving to not just foster technical competencies but to also encourage professional skills like empathy and an other-centered service orientation. In this work, we apply Zaki’s model of empathy — which conceptualizes the construct in terms of its cognitive, affective, and action-oriented components — to guide the creation of a rubric to assess students’ empathy using artifacts produced. While existing tools to measure empathy typically rely on self-reports, we instead focus on a standardized approach to external evaluation. We describe the justification for the decisions made as well as the pilot assessment conducted in February of 2022. In this pilot, we applied the rubric to students’ assignments from four undergraduate biomedical engineering courses seeking to cultivate empathy at a large public institution in the Southeastern United States. These assignments include: 1) user stories from a problem-based learning class; 2) empathy maps from an introductory design class; 3) user needs assessment reports from a senior capstone experience; and 4) personal narratives submitted in a non-traditional storytelling course. Through understanding of the learning activities within our department, we hope to encourage others to explore the effects of their own curriculum on the multi-dimensional development of empathy as part of engineering students’ professional formation. We propose that the rubric developed in this investigation could be a useful tool applied to artifacts from other courses looking to promote empathy and to evaluate the presence of its different components.