Search for: All records

This work in progress paper describes the preliminary findings from the implementation of a graduate engineering student motivation survey with Civil and Environmental Engineering (CEE) doctoral students. In the doctoral process, two phases can be identified: pre-writing and writing. The first phase is generally where most of the coursework is taken, while the second phase is when the dissertation takes most of the time. These phases have been found to be of importance when seeking to address graduate students’ motivation because they present a transition between a more structured and guided process into an unstructured, self-directed, and isolated phase that is prescribed as challenging for students. The graduate student motivation survey, derived from the Expectancy-Value Theory constructs (i.e., interest, attainment, utility, cost, and self-efficacy), was developed by the authors in a prior study. The constructs of interest/intrinsic (how fun and interesting is a task), attainment (personal/identity importance of a task), utility (usefulness for present or future goals), and cost (resources to be invested in a task) are values that individuals consider when selecting and taking actions; Whereas, the self-efficacy construct explores an individual’s beliefs about how well their performance will be on an upcoming task. This motivation survey was distributed among 20 CEE doctoral students during the second week of the Fall 2023 semester. Out of the 20 participants, 3 were in the research phase of their dissertation (writing phase), 16 were still in the process of completing their coursework requirements (pre-writing phase), and 1 did not provide a response about their program phase. Measurement of Expectancy-Value Theory constructs on a scale from 1 to 7 was performed. Analysis of the mean values for each construct between students in the pre-writing phase and those in the writing phase of their doctoral program showed statistical significance with large effect size values for the constructs of attainment and utility. Values for students in the pre-writing phase were higher on the attainment and utility construct, with students in pre-writing phase having attainment and utility mean values of M = 6.29 and M = 5.69, respectively, and those in the writing phase having M = 5.50 and M = 4.17 respectively. These preliminary results can help to better understand students' motivations during their doctoral journey, especially as they make the transition from the pre-writing to the writing phase and may lead to identification of areas where additional support can be provided. 

As engineering students transition from their undergraduate education into their first full-time roles within industry, they are often facing a two year induction period as a result of a Theory-to-Practice gap (Gao & Rhinehart, 2004; Rhinehart, 2019, Rhinehart 2015). The gap between engineering students and industry practitioners can be the result of many different factors: students learning complex and fundamental concepts through simple problems, students having difficulty combining knowledge from different courses to solve realistic scenarios, or the lack of time students have to master these concepts (Rhinehart, 2015). This two year induction period causes problems for the company, the individuals, and for higher education, so it is important to identify areas where this gap exists and how it can potentially be mitigated. One area worthy of investigation related to the Theory to Practice gap is the field of process safety education due to its significant impact on professional practice. This pilot study sought to gain an initial understanding of what differences may exist between how experienced industry practitioners and undergraduate engineering students approach process safety judgments. We used this data as a means for determining if approaches to process safety judgments may be an area related to where this gap has been observed. As part of the pilot study, we conducted interviews with both students and practitioners where we provided them with a list of competing criteria that are relevant to process safety judgements such as time, production, and relationships, and then asked them to describe their approach to making process safety judgments given five specific scenarios. We found that industry practitioners and students were both relying on previous experience when describing their approaches to process safety judgments. Practitioners related the scenarios to prior work place events, while students connected them to problems they learned about in class, internships, or retail jobs. A noted difference between industry practitioners and students was that industry practitioners also described being heavily influenced by relationships with co-workers, superiors, and families when approaching these judgments, which seemed to be lacking in the student responses. Past process safety incidents, as documented by the United States Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board (CSB), have shown that the dynamics of relationships can have an impact on judgment processes which lead to detrimental results. The findings from this study provide additional support for the role of relationships in process safety judgments and the need for process safety instruction that addresses this role. Moving forward, it will be important to expose undergraduate students to the role of relationships in judgment-making processes so that we can better prepare them to navigate the complexities of process safety judgments. 

As engineering students transition from their undergraduate education into their first full-time roles within industry, they are often facing a two year induction period as a result of a Theory-to-Practice gap (Gao & Rhinehart, 2004; Rhinehart, 2019, Rhinehart 2015). The gap between engineering students and industry practitioners can be the result of many different factors: students learning complex and fundamental concepts through simple problems, students having difficulty combining knowledge from different courses to solve realistic scenarios, or the lack of time students have to master these concepts (Rhinehart, 2015). This two year induction period causes problems for the company, the individuals, and for higher education, so it is important to identify areas where this gap exists and how it can potentially be mitigated. One area worthy of investigation related to the Theory to Practice gap is the field of process safety education due to its significant impact on professional practice. This pilot study sought to gain an initial understanding of what differences may exist between how experienced industry practitioners and undergraduate engineering students approach process safety judgments. We used this data as a means for determining if approaches to process safety judgments may be an area related to where this gap has been observed. As part of the pilot study, we conducted interviews with both students and practitioners where we provided them with a list of competing criteria that are relevant to process safety judgements such as time, production, and relationships, and then asked them to describe their approach to making process safety judgments given five specific scenarios. We found that industry practitioners and students were both relying on previous experience when describing their approaches to process safety judgments. Practitioners related the scenarios to prior work place events, while students connected them to problems they learned about in class, internships, or retail jobs. A noted difference between industry practitioners and students was that industry practitioners also described being heavily influenced by relationships with co-workers, superiors, and families when approaching these judgments, which seemed to be lacking in the student responses. Past process safety incidents, as documented by the United States Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board (CSB), have shown that the dynamics of relationships can have an impact on judgment processes which lead to detrimental results. The findings from this study provide additional support for the role of relationships in process safety judgments and the need for process safety instruction that addresses this role. Moving forward, it will be important to expose undergraduate students to the role of relationships in judgment-making processes so that we can better prepare them to navigate the complexities of process safety judgments. 

As engineering students transition from their undergraduate education into their first full-time roles within industry, they are often facing a two year induction period as a result of a Theory-to-Practice gap (Gao & Rhinehart, 2004; Rhinehart, 2019, Rhinehart 2015). The gap between engineering students and industry practitioners can be the result of many different factors: students learning complex and fundamental concepts through simple problems, students having difficulty combining knowledge from different courses to solve realistic scenarios, or the lack of time students have to master these concepts (Rhinehart, 2015). This two year induction period causes problems for the company, the individuals, and for higher education, so it is important to identify areas where this gap exists and how it can potentially be mitigated. One area worthy of investigation related to the Theory to Practice gap is the field of process safety education due to its significant impact on professional practice. This pilot study sought to gain an initial understanding of what differences may exist between how experienced industry practitioners and undergraduate engineering students approach process safety judgments. We used this data as a means for determining if approaches to process safety judgments may be an area related to where this gap has been observed. As part of the pilot study, we conducted interviews with both students and practitioners where we provided them with a list of competing criteria that are relevant to process safety judgements such as time, production, and relationships, and then asked them to describe their approach to making process safety judgments given five specific scenarios. We found that industry practitioners and students were both relying on previous experience when describing their approaches to process safety judgments. Practitioners related the scenarios to prior work place events, while students connected them to problems they learned about in class, internships, or retail jobs. A noted difference between industry practitioners and students was that industry practitioners also described being heavily influenced by relationships with co-workers, superiors, and families when approaching these judgments, which seemed to be lacking in the student responses. Past process safety incidents, as documented by the United States Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board (CSB), have shown that the dynamics of relationships can have an impact on judgment processes which lead to detrimental results. The findings from this study provide additional support for the role of relationships in process safety judgments and the need for process safety instruction that addresses this role. Moving forward, it will be important to expose undergraduate students to the role of relationships in judgment-making processes so that we can better prepare them to navigate the complexities of process safety judgments. 

The existing curriculum and models for civil engineering graduate programs assume that graduating Ph.D. students will primarily pursue career opportunities in research or academia. However, the number of civil engineering Ph.D. graduate students continues to increase, while the number of opportunities in academia for civil engineers remains stagnant. As a result, it is becoming increasingly apparent that the civil engineering graduate programs must be reevaluated to assist students entering industry after graduation. As part of a larger research study funded through the NSF Innovations in Graduate Education (IGE), we aim to answer the following research questions: 1) How can a research-to-practice model assist students in preparing for a transportation engineering career outside of academia?, 2) What impacts does the research-to-practice graduate model have on the development of transportation engineering doctoral students’ professional identity?, 3) How does the cognitive apprenticeship framework prepare doctoral students for professional practice in transportation engineering?, and 4) What influences does the research-to-practice model have on doctoral students’ motivation toward degree completion? As part of the first phase for the project, two surveys were developed: a graduate engineering student motivation survey based on Expectancy-Value-Theory, and an instrument based on the Cognitive Apprenticeship framework. The motivation survey was based on an instrument designed and validated by Brown & Matusovich (2013) which aimed to measure undergraduate engineering students' motivation towards obtaining an engineering degree. The survey prompts were reviewed and rewritten to reflect the change in context from undergraduate to graduate school. Revised survey prompts were reviewed with a group of graduate engineering students through a think aloud protocol and changes to the instrument were made to ensure consistency in interpretation of the prompts (Rodriguez-Mejia and Bodnar, 2023). The cognitive apprenticeship instrument was derived from the Maastricht Clinical Teaching Questionnaire (MCTQ), originally designed to offer clinical educators feedback on their teaching abilities, as provided by medical students during their clerkship rotations (Stalmeijer et al., 2010). To tailor it to the context of engineering graduate students, the MCTQ's 24 items were carefully examined and rephrased. A think aloud was conducted with three civil engineering graduate students to determine the effectiveness and clarity of the cognitive apprenticeship instrument. Preliminary results show that minimal clarification is needed for some items, and suggestions to include items which address support from their mentors. The other part of the project assessment involves students completing monthly reflections to obtain their opinions on specific events such as seminars or classes, and identify their perceptions of their identity as professionals, scientists, or researchers. Preliminary results suggest that the students involved place an emphasis on developing critical thinking and planning skills to become an engineering professional, but de-emphasize passion and enjoyment. This paper will report on initial findings obtained through this first phase of the IGE project. 

Faculty members are instrumental in the delivery of process safety curriculum and key stakeholders in efforts to improve process safety education. This study evaluated faculty’s view of the relevance of specific criteria in process safety decisions and whether their criteria prioritization changed after exposure to a group play-through of a digital process safety game. Faculty found relevance in the proposed criteria and had relatively stable prioritization of these criteria both before and after game play. 

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. 

Alongside the continued evolution of the field of engineering education, the number of early career faculty members who identify as members of the discipline continues to increase. This growth has resulted in a new wave of roles, titles, and experiences for engineering education researchers, many of which have yet to be explored and understood. To address this gap, our research team is investigating the ways in which early career engineering education faculty are able to achieve impact in their current roles. Our aim is to provide insights on the ways in which these researchers can have new and evolving forms of impact within the engineering education field. The work presented herein explores the transition experiences of our research team, consisting of six early-career faculty, and the ways in which we experience agency at the individual, institutional, and field and societal levels. Doing so is necessary to consider the diverse backgrounds, visions, goals, plans, and commitments of early career faculty members. Guided by two qualitative research methodologies: collaborative inquiry and collaborative autoethnography, we are able to explore our lived experiences and respective academic cultures through iterative cycles of reflection and action towards agency. The poster presented will provide an update on our NSF RFE work through Phase 1 of our two phase investigation. Thus far the investigation has involved analysis of our reflections from the first two years of our faculty roles to identify critical incidents within the early career transition and development of our identities as faculty members. Additionally, we have collected reflective data to understand each of our goals, relevant aspects of our identity and desired areas of impact. Analysis of the transition has resulted in new insights on the aspects of transition, focusing on types of impactful situations, and the supports and strategies that are utilized. Analysis has begun to explore the role of identity on each members desired areas of impact and their ability to have impact. Data will also be presented from a survey of near peers, providing insight into the ways in which each early career engineering education faculty believe they are able to and desire to have impact in their current position. The collective analysis around the transition into a faculty role, strategic actions of new faculty, desired impact areas, and faculty identity will play a role in the development of our conceptual model of early career faculty agency. Additionally, this analysis provides the groundwork for phase two of our study, where we will seek to place the experiences of our group within the context of the larger community of early career engineering education faculty. 

Process safety is at the heart of operation of many chemical processing companies. However, the Chemical Safety Board (CSB) has still documented over 800 investigations of process safety failures since the year 2000. While not all of these incidents were severe, some did lead to employee injuries or death and environmental harm. As a result, chemical engineering companies are increasingly dedicated to process safety through training programs and detailed vigilance as part of their operations practice. AIChE and OSHA also offer courses in process safety to help support the industry. These efforts illustrate the paramount importance that chemical engineering graduates have an appreciation and understanding of process safety as they transition from their degree program into industrial positions. Previous studies have shown that despite difficulties due to course load constraints, process safety has been incorporated into chemical engineering curriculum through either the addition of new courses, incorporation of the content within existing classes, or a combination of the two methods. A review performed in Process Safety Progress suggested that a key step for departments moving forward is to perform an assessment of the process safety culture within their institution in order to determine how faculty and students view process safety. An issue with completing this task is the lack of assessment tools that can be used to determine how students are developing their understanding of process safety decision making. This observation led to the development of the Engineering Process Safety Research Instrument (EPSRI). This instrument is modeled after the Defining Issues Test version 2 (DIT2) and the Engineering Ethical Reasoning Instrument (EERI). Similar to these instruments, the EPSRI provides dilemmas, three decisions, and 12 additional considerations that individuals must rate based on their relative importance to their decision making process. The dilemmas developed in the EPSRI are based on case studies and investigations from process safety failures that have occurred in industry to provide a realistic context for the decision making decisions that engineers may be faced with upon employment. The considerations provided after the scenario are derived to reflect pre-conventional, conventional, and post-conventional decision making thinking as described by Kohlberg’s Moral Development Theory. Pre-conventional decision making thinking focuses particularly on what is right/wrong or good/bad from an individual level, whereas post-conventional thinking seeks to determine what is correct from moral and value perspectives at the society level. This WIP paper describes the content validity study conducted while developing the EPSRI. Dilemmas were examined by context experts including professionals in the process industry, chemical engineering departments, and learning sciences field. Content experts reviewed the dilemmas and determined whether they represented accurate examples of process safety decision making that individuals may face in real-world engineering settings. The experts also reviewed the 12 considerations for each dilemma for their accuracy in capturing pre-conventional, conventional and post-conventional thinking. This work represents the first step in the overall instrument validation that will take place over the next academic year.