2026 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Chemical engineering students will be required to make process safety judgments in their careers, however, process safety judgments are influenced by a variety of situational elements that undergraduate students might not necessarily anticipate. Factors such as relationships, safety cultures, and pressures from budgets or production have all influenced previous judgments that have resulted in process safety failures. Although process safety education focuses on equipping students with process safety concepts, techniques, and approaches, the current pedagogical methods struggle to simulate real-world judgments. As a result, there may be a Theory-to-Practice gap that exists between students and practitioners.

The Theory-to-Practice gap accounts for the time it takes for an engineering student to become an effective contributor in their workplace. This gap can be due to a variety of factors such as complex topics being taught through simple, textbook problems, difficult or lack of opportunities to combine knowledge from different courses to solve realistic problems, or the lack of time students have to master these concepts. A model that can be used to help identify whether the theory to practice gap exists by delineating skills across different stages of expertise is the Dreyfus Five-Stage Model of Adult Skills Acquisition. This study applies the Dreyfus Five-Stage Model of Adult Skills Acquisition to student and practitioner responses to process safety judgments to identify if there are any differences between these two populations with a specific emphasis on student and practitioners’ perspectives. Specifically, we examine:

RQ1) What differences exist between chemical engineering students & experienced practitioners’ perspectives when making process safety judgments? and RQ2) What differences exist in perspectives based on participants’ skills acquisition level?

To answer these research questions, two groups of participants were interviewed using the same data collection protocol; 17 practicing engineers with varying years of experience who had worked in process safety, and 11 chemical engineering students (1 junior, 10 seniors) enrolled in a senior design course. Data was collected through interviews where participants responded to five process safety scenarios and provided rationale for their responses. Participants’ responses were coded holistically for their perspectives using a codebook deductively developed from the Dreyfus Skills Acquisition model. This study found that students were often concerned with their tone of response or following procedures when making a judgment, or would prioritize/deprioritize situational elements when they did not know how to proceed. In contrast, practitioners would rely on previous experience when prioritizing criteria, and would describe next steps to avoid miscommunication, prevent further injuries or incidents, or optimize procedures.