(225e) How Summer School Improved Our Safety Education in the Unit Operations Laboratory

Tracy Carter, Samira Azarin, Janie Brennan, Elizabeth Hill, Amy Karlsson

How Summer School Improved Our Safety Education in the Unit Operations Laboratory

Industry has identified a skills gap between what is needed and what students are able to do by the time they graduate.¹ Creating change in knowledge, skills and attributes of students to meet industry needs in the undergraduate curriculum can be difficult. However a change model proposed by Henerson et al² has shown that effective changes can be made. The change model consists of four aspects: 1. Developing a shared vision, 2. Enacting policy, 3. Disseminating curriculum and pedagogy, and 4. Developing reflective teachers.

The ASEE summer school created the opportunity for developing a shared vision. Five unit operations instructors from five different universities across the country had the occasion to discuss the opportunities and challenges they face teaching this core chemical engineering laboratory course. One issue that resonated with all instructors was safety. This is because safety and safety education is driven not only by ABET policy, but by the core ethics of engineering.^3,4

Over the past year these instructors collaborated on identifying the safety goals and outcomes for their respective courses and have identified outcomes that are similar between the various institutions. They have worked together to create a change in undergraduate safety education, specifically in the area of identifying major regulations. This outcome has been identified by AICHE’s Safety and Chemical Engineering Education (SAChE) Committee as a key learning outcome that meets ABET criteria.⁵ The next year will be focused on disseminating curriculum that meets this outcome and reflecting as a group how well the outcome was met.

1. Luo, Y., Westmoreland, P. R., Alkaya, D.,Alves da Cruz, R. V., Grossmann, I. E., Provine, W. D., Silverstein, D. L., Steininger II, R. J., Talbot, J. B., Varma, A., McCreight, T., Chin, K, Schuster, D., Academia-Industry Alignment: Expectations about New Graduates, an NSF-Sponsored Study led by the American Institute of Chemical Engineers. 2015.
2. Henderson, C., A. Beach, and N. Finkelstein, Facilitating change in undergraduate STEM instructional practices: An analytic review of the literature. Journal of Research in Science Teaching, 2011. 48(8): p. 952-984.
3. Criteria for Accrediting Engineering Programs, 2016 – 2017.[cited 2017; Available from: http://www.abet.org/accreditation/accreditation-criteria/criteria-for-ac....
4. National Society of Professional Engineers, Code of Ethics.[cited 2018; Available from: https://www.nspe.org/resources/ethics/code-ethics].
5. SAChE Recommendations for ABET Safety Content in Chemical Engineering February 18, 2010. [cited 2018; Available from: http://sache.org/SACHEGuidelinesForABET.pdf].