2023 ASEE Annual Conference & 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.