2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Work-in-Progress: A Living Laboratory: Inquiry-Based Learning in Chemical Engineering

Presented at WiP: Hands-on Learning and Safety

This work-in-progress paper investigates how incorporating inquiry-based learning laboratories into core chemical engineering courses affects students and faculty at a large, private university in the Northeast United States. Traditional chemical engineering curricula first engage students with the theory behind real-world processes and reserve hands-on applications for the upper-level Unit Operations laboratory course. However, existing literature suggests that redesigning the curriculum to have students learn theory and immediately apply it to real-world equipment could benefit student motivation and knowledge retention. Toward this end, we are currently deconstructing the existing Unit Operations course into self-contained experimental “inquiry labs” and implementing these inquiry-based labs into courses in the second and third years of the curriculum. At this point, we have incorporated four inquiry labs into the first required course of the curriculum, mass and energy balances. To assess the impact of these labs, we employed a mixed-methods study with pre-surveys to gather baseline data for both students and faculty and conducted interviews and focus groups with students engaged in the inquiry labs. Specifically, this study describes initial findings on the impact of these labs on student learning, motivation, and engineering identity as well as faculty attitudes towards curriculum change and engagement with active learning. Future work will continue to assess the impact of incorporating inquiry labs in subsequent courses on student’s and faculty’s attitudes toward these changes through a longitudinal study. By understanding the effect of active learning implementation on this department, we can better understand the potential for curriculum improvement across all engineering disciplines.

Authors

Dr. Francis Ledesma http://orcid.org/0000-0002-6280-1394 Cornell University [biography]

Dr. Francis Ledesma is a Postdoctoral Associate in Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at Cornell University. His research focuses on incorporating active learning into the traditional core chemical engineering curriculum and studying the resulting effects on both students and faculty. He received his Ph.D. in Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering from the University of California, Berkeley and his B.S. in Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering from Cornell University.
Dr. Allison Godwin http://orcid.org/0000-0002-0741-3356 Cornell University [biography]

Allison Godwin, Ph.D. is the Dr. G. Stephen Irwin '67, '68 Professor in Engineering Education Research (Associate Professor) in the Robert Frederick Smith School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at Cornell University. She is also the Associate Director of the Cornell NanoScale Science and Technology Facility and a McCormick Teaching Excellence Institute Research Fellow. Her research focuses on how identity, among other affective factors, influences diverse groups of students to choose engineering and persist in engineering. She also studies how different experiences within the practice and culture of engineering foster or hinder belonging, motivation, and identity development. Dr. Godwin graduated from Clemson University with a B.S. in Chemical Engineering and Ph.D. in Engineering and Science Education. Her research earned her a National Science Foundation CAREER Award focused on characterizing latent diversity, which includes diverse attitudes, mindsets, and approaches to learning to understand engineering students’ identity development. She has won several awards for her research including the 2021 Chemical Engineering Education William H. Corcoran Award, 2022 American Educational Research Association Education in the Professions (Division I) 2021-2022 Outstanding Research Publication Award, and the 2023 AIChE Excellence in Engineering Education Research Award.
Dr. T. Michael Duncan Cornell University

Note

The full paper will be available to logged in and registered conference attendees once the conference starts on June 22, 2025, and to all visitors after the conference ends on June 25, 2025

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