2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

With the evolution and expansion of the chemical industry, the gap between academia and industry is broadened. The skills that the workforce expected from practicing engineers are not taught in the typical chemical engineering undergraduate core curriculum. Students become less engaged and less motivated by not seeing the applications of course content in their courses. Therefore, they struggle to identify with the field and develop skills necessary for the workplace. This NSF PFE: RIEF project aims to bridge the gap by implementing industry-relevant up-to-date problems into a sophomore chemical engineering course.

The project’s main goal is to understand how the implementation impacts students’ engineering identity and self-efficacy development. We employed a design-based research approach (DBR) with one baseline and two full enactment cycles. In each cycle, students are surveyed, and focus groups are interviewed before and after implementation.

In this paper, we will present the details of data collection, analysis, and findings from the results from all three semesters. The challenges and gains of adopting the approach and how to transfer to other programs will be further discussed.