Collaborative Research: Research: Agency in Chemical Engineering Experiments

University Of New Mexico, Albuquerque NM

Investigators

Abstract

The Agency in Chemical Engineering Experiments (ACEE) project will investigate how different approaches to teaching laboratory experiments impact students’ learning and development as chemical engineers. Laboratory experiments play a key role in the professional formation of chemical engineers, who use experiments in industry to develop innovative products, in research to conduct studies, and in design to gather information and test solutions. Yet at many institutions, laboratory courses have remained relatively unchanged, and modernizing efforts have primarily focused on updating equipment, content, and procedures. There are many different decisions students could make — in other words, many ways they could have agency — from choosing variables to choosing which audience to report their results to. This project will evaluate the effect of giving students differing levels of agency throughout the experiment on the students’ lab experience. The ACEE project will study chemical engineering laboratory courses at the University of New Mexico and Montana State University to better understand how such courses can better support student development toward independent problem-solving and communication, thus producing graduates better prepared for the challenges of professional engineering. The primary aim of the ACEE project is to extend theory about how consequential agency functions to support learning and engineering identity. Past research has connected agency, learning, and identity, and provided insights into both benefits of and barriers to high-agency learning experiences. To identify experiences critical to professional formation, the ACEE Project will investigate students’ agency in four domains: (1) experimental design prior to doing the lab; (2) experimental oversight during the lab, including variables to manipulate, data collection frequency, and documentation during their experiments; (3) data analysis and interpretation; and (4) communication of their purpose, methods, and conclusions. This project extends recent research on agency to answer the following research questions: (1) To what extent do existing laboratory experiments offer students consequential agency in the four domains (i.e., experimental design, experimental oversight, data analysis, communication)? (2) To what extent does perceived consequential agency in the four domains contribute to students’ sense of belonging in engineering/engineering identity and learning how to design and report experiments? (3) Across these, how do groups of students differ? The team will examine the agency students might have, differentiating between lower agency and consequential agency, which is defined as having and taking up opportunities to make decisions that are consequential to how students learn, to what students learn, and to the learning activities themselves. In the context of a laboratory experiment, this means that students can make decisions that affect later steps of their work; for instance, if students choose some parameters of their experiment, this impacts the data they collect and the kinds of analysis they will do. The ACEE Project will investigate existing upper-division, undergraduate laboratory experiments across two chemical engineering programs which will offer a chance to conduct comparisons of various existing and common teaching approaches. Students’ opportunities for consequential agency in specific domains will be assessed using the Agency Levels in Learning Opportunities Tool (ALLOT) while students’ perceptions of agency and engineering identity will be measured using surveys. By answering the proposed questions, the ACEE Project will extend a more nuanced understanding of the criticality of agency in the conjoined learning/identity-formation process. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.