More Like this

1. Authentic process safety decisions in an engineering ethics context: expression of student moral development within surveys and immersive environments

   https://doi.org/10.1080/22054952.2020.1809881  

   Stransky, Jeffrey; Bodnar, Cheryl A.; Cooper, Mathew; Anastasio, Daniel; Burkey, Daniel (January 2020, Australasian Journal of Engineering Education)

   null (Ed.)

   Two methods of assessing senior chemical engineering student ethical decision making in a process safety context were developed; the case-study-based Engineering Process Safety Reasoning Instrument (EPSRI) and a digital immersive environment entitled Contents Under Pressure. Both interventions had similar ethical and process safety decision prompts, but were presented in different manners; the EPSRI as a traditional electronic survey, and Contents Under Pressure as a digital immersive environment (“game”). 148 chemical engineering seniors at three institutions responded to both interventions and responses were compared. Student responses to the traditionally formatted EPSRI revealed most students applied post-conventional reasoning, which is uncommon for students in their age range. This suggests that students are aware of the ethical framing of the instrument, and answer accordingly with the perceived “right” response. Student responses to Contents Under Pressure showed significant differences from the EPSRI, including more typical conventional responses. These results suggest that the authenticity of the digital environment can produce more realistic student responses to ethical and process safety dilemmas. Situating ethical and process safety instruction within this type of educational intervention may allow students to gain insight on their ethical decision making process in a safer, low-risk environment. 

   more » « less
2. Collaborative Research: Experiential Process Safety Training for Chemical Engineers

   Anastasio, D. D.; Butler, B. L.; Burkey, D. D.; Cooper, M.; Bodnar, C. A. (June 2019, 2019 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition)

   Process safety has become a critical component of chemical engineering education. However, students may find it difficult to fully understand the ramifications of decisions they make during classroom exercises due to their lack of real world experience. Use of an immersive digital environment where students could role play as chemical engineering employees making process safety decisions could be one method of achieving this goal. Through this experience, students could observe the outcomes of their decisions in a safe, controlled environment without the disastrous real-world consequences that could come from making a mistake. This digital environment could have further features, such as time constraints or interactions with other characters, to make the experience feel more authentic than an in-class discussion or case study. In order to evaluate the efficacy of such a virtual environment, a portion of this work centered around the creation of the Engineering Process Safety Research Instrument (EPSRI). The instrument asks participants to evaluate process safety dilemmas and rank a set of considerations based on how influential they were in their decision-making process. The instrument then classifies each decision based on the stages of Kohlberg’s moral development theory, ranging from pre-conventional (i.e. more self-centered) thinking to post-conventional (i.e. more global) thinking. This instrument will be used to assess how students’ thinking about process safety decisions changes as a result of engaging in the virtual safety decision making environment. This paper will summarize the progress since the project’s start in summer 2017, highlighting the work completed in development and validation of the EPSRI. This process included content validation, think-aloud studies to improve clarity of the instrument, and factor analysis based on a large scale implementation at multiple universities. The paper will also discuss the development of the minimum viable product digital process safety experience, including establishment of learning outcomes and the mechanics that reinforce those outcomes. By presenting these findings, we intend to spread awareness of the EPSRI, which can evaluate the safety decisions of chemical engineering students while having the potential to launch discussions about safety and ethics in other engineering disciplines. We also hope that these results will provide educators with insights into how to translate educational objectives to elements of a digital learning environment through collaboration with digital media companies. 

   more » « less
3. Collaborative Research: Experiential Process Safety Training for Chemical Engineers, poster presentation and peer-reviewed proceedings, ASEE National Meeting, Tampa, FL.

   Anastasio, D; Butler, B; Burkey, D; Cooper, M; Bodnar, C (January 2019, ASEE Annual Conference proceedings)

   Process safety has become a critical component of chemical engineering education. However, students may find it difficult to fully understand the ramifications of decisions they make during classroom exercises due to their lack of real world experience. Use of an immersive digital environment where students could role play as chemical engineering employees making process safety decisions could be one method of achieving this goal. Through this experience, students could observe the outcomes of their decisions in a safe, controlled environment without the disastrous real-world consequences that could come from making a mistake. This digital environment could have further features, such as time constraints or interactions with other characters, to make the experience feel more authentic than an in-class discussion or case study. In order to evaluate the efficacy of such a virtual environment, a portion of this work centered around the creation of the Engineering Process Safety Research Instrument (EPSRI). The instrument asks participants to evaluate process safety dilemmas and rank a set of considerations based on how influential they were in their decision-making process. The instrument then classifies each decision based on the stages of Kohlberg’s moral development theory, ranging from pre-conventional (i.e. more self-centered) thinking to post-conventional (i.e. more global) thinking. This instrument will be used to assess how students’ thinking about process safety decisions changes as a result of engaging in the virtual safety decision making environment. This paper will summarize the progress since the project’s start in summer 2017,, highlighting the work completed in development and validation of the EPSRI. This process included content validation, think-aloud studies to improve clarity of the instrument, and factor analysis based on a large scale implementation at multiple universities. The paper will also discuss the development of the minimum viable product digital process safety experience, including establishment of learning outcomes and the mechanics that reinforce those outcomes. By presenting these findings, we intend to spread awareness of the EPSRI, which can evaluate the safety decisions of chemical engineering students while having the potential to launch discussions about safety and ethics in other engineering disciplines. We also hope that these results will provide educators with insights into how to translate educational objectives to elements of a digital learning environment through collaboration with digital media companies. 

   more » « less
4. Criteria Conundrum: Engineering Students’ Beliefs about the Role of Competing Criteria in Process Safety Judgements

   Ritz, C.; Stransky, J.; Bodnar, C. A.; Dringenberg, E.; Miskioglu, E. (January 2023, American Society for Engineering Education Annual Conference and Exposition)

   This research paper focuses on comparing engineering students’ beliefs and behaviors related to making process safety judgements. Despite emphasis on process safety education, serious health and safety accidents in the chemical process industry continue to occur. Investigations of major incidents have reported that, in many cases, tension caused by the need to balance several competing criteria was the culprit. While there have been substantial improvements in process safety education, most efforts have focused on preventing incidents through safer design, while few have focused on making process safety judgements in situations that have competing criteria. This pilot study investigates (1) what are engineering students’ beliefs about how they would approach process safety judgements with competing criteria? and (2) how do students react to the process of comparing their beliefs and behaviors in process safety judgements? We interviewed three chemical engineering students to determine their beliefs about making judgements in process safety contexts with competing criteria. Next, the students played through a digital process safety game, Contents Under Pressure (CUP). In CUP, students make process safety judgements in a digital chemical plant setting, and the judgements they encounter include a variety of criteria juxtapositions. Upon completing CUP, students were asked to reflect on their criteria priorities as they believed they played CUP through an online survey. GAP Profiles were generated as a way to directly compare initial beliefs, gameplay, and reflection criteria priorities. Finally, students reconciled differences between their beliefs and behaviors through a semi-structured interview, prompting students to think about the cause of the observed differences. In the initial beliefs interviews, we identified themes tied to prioritization of competing criteria. Some students rationalized their prioritizations by aligning them with their perceived priorities of the company, while others overcomplicated proposed hypotheticals in an attempt to find an optimized outcome. None of the participants could understand the link between process safety judgements and relationships, so they tended to devalue this criterion in their prioritizations. After playing CUP, the students communicated a better awareness of how relationships influence process safety judgements. Following gameplay, all participants stated that in-game feedback was critical to the ways in which they made judgements during CUP. Some participants indicated that their behaviors in CUP were more representative of the way they would approach process safety judgements in real life than their responses in the initial interview. This result may suggest that students have difficulty accurately predicting how they will apply process safety criteria in judgements without practicing these priorities in context. Results of this pilot study indicate that using a game-based approach to practice judgements with competing criteria gives students an opportunity to gain awareness about their approaches to process safety judgements and any differences that exist with their formulated beliefs. 

   more » « less
5. Students use their lived experiences to justify their beliefs about how they will approach process safety judgements.

   Stransky, J.; Ritz, C.; Bodnar, C.A.; Dringenberg, E.; Miskioglu, E. (January 2023, ASEE annual conference exposition proceedings)

   In the chemical industry, judgements related to process safety hold the potential to lead to process incidents, such as chemical leaks and mechanical failures that can have severe consequences. Many of these judgements require engineers to juxtapose competing criteria including leadership, production, relationships, safety, spending, and time. For such judgements, numerous factors are at play, including our beliefs about ourselves and our intention to behave a particular way. As part of a larger research project funded through the NSF Research in the Formation of Engineers (RFE) program, we are working to investigate: 1) What do engineering students and practitioners believe about how they approach making judgements?, 2) how do they behave when actually making judgements?, 3) what gap, if any, exists between their beliefs and behavior?, and 4) how do they reconcile any gaps between their beliefs and behaviors? After completion of the first year of the project, we have interviewed fourteen senior chemical engineering students about how they believe they will approach process safety judgements in scenarios where they must juxtapose competing criteria. During our initial analysis to characterize students’ espoused beliefs about their approaches towards making process safety judgements, we identified an emergent finding about how they justify these beliefs. We present this emergent finding by answering the research question: How do undergraduate engineering students justify their beliefs about how they will make judgements in process safety contexts? When we asked students to provide reasoning for the beliefs they conveyed about how they will approach process safety judgements, we found that overwhelmingly, students used their lived experiences in different work settings to justify their beliefs. These lived experiences included engineering co-ops, internships, volunteer, and retail work. This emergent finding suggests that students’ lived experiences may be greatly informing their espoused beliefs about how they will approach process safety judgements. This paper will also briefly discuss implications for process safety educators on how they may incorporate lived experiences, or other ways of knowing, so students may develop more robust beliefs about process safety judgements. 

   more » « less