2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Criteria Conundrum: Engineering Students’ Beliefs about the Role of Competing Criteria in Process Safety Judgements

Presented at Entrepreneurship and Inventive Thinking & Student Beliefs

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.

Authors

Cayla Ritz Rowan University [biography]

Cayla Ritz, is pursuing a Ph.D in Engineering Education in the Experiential Engineering Education Department at Rowan University. Her research focuses on how story-driven games can be used to help engineering students understand how they may make decisions in professional engineering roles. She is particularly interested in how engineers make decisions in public welfare, community/environmental safety, and social contexts.
Jeffrey Stransky http://orcid.org/0000-0002-4247-4322 New Jersey Institute of Technology [biography]

Dr. Stransky is a post-doctoral research associate in the School of Applied Engineering and Technology at the New Jersey Institute of Technology. He obtained his PhD in Engineering Education and MS in Mechanical Engineering from ¬¬Rowan university. Dr. Stransky seeks to understand the engineering ideologies that promote potential disparities between engineers' practices and their micro- and macroethics. Dr. Stransky is passionate about developing innovative educational interventions that measurably enhance students’ skills and competencies.
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4247-4322
Dr. Cheryl A. Bodnar Rowan University [biography]

Dr. Bodnar is an Associate Professor in the Experiential Engineering Education Department at Rowan University. Her research interests relate to the incorporation of active learning techniques such as game-based learning in undergraduate classes as well as innovation and entrepreneurship.
Dr. Emily Dringenberg http://orcid.org/0000-0001-7635-7047 The Ohio State University [biography]

Dr. Dringenberg is an Associate Professor in the Department of Engineering Education at Ohio State University. She holds a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering (Kansas State '08), a M.S. in Industrial Engineering (Purdue '14) and a Ph.D. in Engineering Education. Her current career purpose is to learn about and reveal beliefs that are widely-held as an implicit result of our socialization within systems of oppression so that she can embolden others to reflect on their assumptions and advance equity in their own ways.
Dr. Elif Miskioglu Bucknell University [biography]

Dr. Elif Miskioglu is an early-career engineering education scholar and educator. She holds a B.S. in Chemical Engineering (with Genetics minor) from Iowa State University, and an M.S. and Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering from Ohio State University. Her early Ph.D. work focused on the development of bacterial biosensors capable of screening pesticides for specifically targeting the malaria vector mosquito, Anopheles gambiae. As a result, her diverse background also includes experience in infectious disease and epidemiology, providing crucial exposure to the broader context of engineering problems and their subsequent solutions. These diverse experiences and a growing passion for improving engineering education prompted Dr. Miskioglu to change her career path and become a scholar of engineering education. As an educator, she is committed to challenging her students to uncover new perspectives and dig deeper into the context of the societal problems engineering is intended to solve. As a scholar, she seeks to not only contribute original theoretical research to the field, but work to bridge the theory-to-practice gap in engineering education by serving as an ambassador for empirically driven educational practices.

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