2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Unit operations (UO) lab courses prepare chemical engineering students for their careers through hands-on experience and are an essential component of any baccalaureate chemical engineering program. These courses typically involve engagement with pilot-scale and/or lab-scale chemical process equipment to help students connect the theory learned in the prior courses to related experiments and methods they’ll see in industry. Student engagement with these labs typically involves navigating the physical environment of the lab and course policies, such as reading lab manuals, required attendance, and inflexible assignment and oral presentation deadlines due to the nature of group work and lab rotations. Most laboratory spaces, course policies, and course materials are created with non-disabled individuals in mind. Creating an equitable and accessible learning environment requires proactively designing the space and course policies for students with physical and mental disabilities and chronic illnesses, enabling them to fully engage with this important experiential learning opportunity. By modeling accessibility through the lab design and course policies, as well as intentionally discussing workplace accessibility, laboratory instructors can teach students the importance of designing and maintaining accessible spaces and the skills to achieve these goals in their future work. In this study, we surveyed UO lab instructors to understand how, or if, accessible design is implemented in existing chemical engineering lab courses to understand how our institutions and programs are supporting disabled and chronically ill students. We draw on our experience and the survey responses to provide both short-term and long-term changes that instructors can implement to move toward an accessibly designed UO lab space and course.