2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Board 419: Students use their Lived Experiences to Justify their Beliefs about How they Will Approach Process Safety Judgment

Presented at NSF Grantees Poster Session

In the chemical industry, judgments 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 judgments require engineers to juxtapose competing criteria including leadership, production, relationships, safety, spending, and time. For such judgments, 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 judgments in scenarios where they must juxtapose competing criteria. During our initial analysis to characterize students’ espoused beliefs about their approaches towards making process safety judgments, 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 judgments in process safety contexts? When we asked students to provide reasoning for the beliefs they conveyed about how they will approach process safety judgments, 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 judgments. 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 judgments.

Authors

Jeffrey Stransky http://orcid.org/0000-0002-4247-4322 Rowan University [biography]

Jeffrey Stransky is a PhD candidate in the Experiential Engineering Education (ExEEd) Department at Rowan University. His research interests involve studying engineering ethics and decision making and using digital games as safe teaching environments. He has published in the overlap of these topics by integrating digital games into chemical engineering curriculum to help students build an awareness of the ethical and practical implications of their decisions. Jeffrey obtained his BS and MSc in Mechanical Engineering from Rowan University (Glassboro, NJ).
Brittany Lynn Butler [biography]

Brittany Butler is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in Engineering Education in the Experiential Engineering Education department at Rowan University. Her research focuses on the differences in chemical engineering students' and industry professionals' expertise in the context of process safety, and how to leverage industry professionals' knowledge to further develop student’s process safety knowledge.
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.
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.
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.

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