2026 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Partnerships between universities and industry play a vital role in preparing engineering students to connect theoretical knowledge with authentic professional practice. These collaborations foster the development of transferable skills such as teamwork, communication, and problem-solving, while also helping students see the relevance of disciplinary concepts in real-world engineering contexts. In chemical engineering education, industry partnerships are most commonly concentrated in senior-level design or capstone projects, leaving a limited understanding of how collaborative or co-curricular experiences are introduced earlier in the curriculum. Foundational sophomore- and junior-level courses such as Material and Energy Balances, Thermodynamics, Fluid Mechanics, Heat and Mass Transfer, and Reaction Kinetics provide opportunities for early professional engagement. Yet, there has been no systematic synthesis of how and to what extent these experiences are designed, implemented, or studied within the middle years of chemical engineering programs. This study addresses this gap by conducting a scoping review of the literature on co-curricular and industry-collaborative learning experiences in foundational chemical engineering courses.
The purpose of this scoping review is to map and characterize published work on co-curricular and industry-collaborative learning within foundational chemical engineering courses. A five-year window (2020–2025) was chosen to capture pedagogical trends and current innovations, ensuring the review reflects the most recent developments in co-curricular and industry-collaborative practices. In particular, this review aims to (1) describe the extent and nature of industry partnerships and co-curricular learning initiatives reported in the literature, (2) identify patterns in course design and learning outcomes, and (3) highlight gaps and opportunities for future research.
Guided by the PRISMA-ScR framework, a structured search strategy was employed to identify key journals relevant to engineering and chemical engineering education, including the Journal of Engineering Education (JEE), Chemical Engineering Education (CEE), and Education for Chemical Engineers (ECE). The Boolean search strings for this study captured the intersection of terms describing chemical engineering foundations, co-curricular, or industry-collaborative learning. For example, one search string included: “chemical engineering” AND (“industry collaboration” OR “co-curricular”) AND (“sophomore” OR “junior” OR “middle years”). The searches, limited to English-language publications, yielded 134 articles from JEE, 50 from CEE, and 116 from ECE before de-duplication. Ongoing analysis includes removing duplicates, screening titles and abstracts against inclusion criteria, and extracting data related to course context (e.g., course level, disciplinary focus, and delivery mode), type of collaboration, stakeholder roles, learning objectives, and assessment strategies.
Results from this review will provide a starting point for understanding how industry-collaborative learning is incorporated into foundational chemical engineering education. Anticipated outcomes include a descriptive overview of the types of collaborations implemented, the disciplinary courses most frequently involved, and the learning domains emphasized. The synthesis will also examine conceptual and methodological patterns, including the use of validated assessment instruments and the representation of different institutional contexts, to highlight both strengths and gaps that can inform future research. Ultimately, the findings of this review may guide researchers in identifying future directions, framing research questions, and selecting methods that strengthen the understanding of how industry collaborations are integrated into foundational chemical engineering education.