(153g) Revealing the Decision-Making Processes of ChE Students in Process Safety Contexts

Process safety has always been important within the chemical engineering profession. Chemical engineering companies use a variety of methods to ensure that their employees have an understanding about and are able to follow process safety protocols. These methods include e-learning focused on instructional systems design, process safety management techniques such as internal audits and checklists, and hazard identification training. Organizations such as AIChE and SAChE also offer safety courses online for individuals working within this industry. However, most of these programs and methods focus on recognition of process safety hazards and do not emphasize the importance of the reasoning that surrounds process safety decision making. This same problem also occurs in undergraduate classrooms where students are taught to recognize safety hazards and warning signs, but instruction is not necessarily focused upon the thought process that accompanies a process safety decision.

This absence of work to understand the reasoning that individuals use to make process safety decisions is of particular importance since work done by Sadler and Zeidler (2005) has shown empirically that students approach socioscientific decisions using some combination of three distinct forms of informal reasoning: rationalistic, emotive, and intuitive. Rationalistic informal reasoning involves the use of logic and weighing options when considering a decision. Emotive informal reasoning includes evaluating the impact the decision might have on others involved and exhibiting empathy by trying to understand the feelings of others. The last form of informal reasoning, intuitive, relates to following one’s “gut feeling” or first reaction to a situation.

In this study, five senior chemical engineering students described out loud their reasoning when making decisions about seven distinct process safety scenarios. The process safety scenarios represent dilemmas that individuals might face in industry and ranged from making choices about whether to report chemical spills to governmental agencies to determining if staff should stay in place at a chemical plant when there is an impending severe weather event. Each student was asked to elaborate on what role they believed that rationalistic, emotive, and intuitive informal reasoning served in their decision making process. These think-aloud sessions were transcribed and analyzed qualitatively to understand the ways in which engineering students reason through hypothetical decisions related to process safety. This presentation will discuss the results obtained from this study and observations made on which informal reasoning or combination of these approaches students use when making process safety decisions.