New research project explores impact of giving engineering students more freedom in the lab: UNM Newsroom

A group from The University of New Mexico will lead a new National Science Basis-funded exploration venture to analyze the challenge of agency — the electric power to make one’s possess conclusions — when it will come to the potential for chemical engineering college students to have more overall flexibility in coming up with and building laboratory experiments for class.

The grant, called “Agency in Chemical Engineering Experiments,” is led by Vanessa Svihla, a UNM understanding scientist, and Eva Chi, a professor of chemical and organic engineering. They are collaborating with scientists at Montana State University to look into how various strategies to teaching laboratory experiments impression students’ finding out and advancement as chemical engineers.

Chi, who teaches a laboratory program for chemical engineering undergraduates, claimed the goal of this review is to decide how best the engineering students of today — who have been lifted on a continual stream of technologies and have a short while ago endured a pandemic — learn and interpret details.

“The pandemic changed a large amount of items,” she mentioned. “It forced us to enable students have additional agency in how they learned, providing them choices. And from that we observed a big variation in what was done and how learners reacted to it.”

She explained usually what professors consider motivates pupils has small to no effect. For occasion, Chi said one UNM professor made the decision to existing a obstacle to his lab pupils by giving them an assignment to acquire info, centered on a pre-prescribed set of parameters, with the enticement that the info they collected would be aspect of a printed research write-up.

“What we learned was that it wasn’t authentic to them,” she reported. “A publication was not applicable to them, so it did not inspire them. It felt a lot like a recipe, just pursuing a collection of methods.”

Svihla points out that for chemical engineers, laboratory experiments participate in a very important part in their expert development, but at many establishments, lab courses have adjusted tiny more than the many years, with most modernization attempts primarily concentrated on equipment, articles and procedures, not the sum of management college students have around how they perform experiments.

“There are a lot of distinct choices learners could make — in other text, lots of approaches they could have agency — from selecting variables to deciding upon which audience to report their final results to,” she said. “This venture will examine the effect of providing students differing concentrations of agency through the experiment on the students’ lab practical experience.”

Svihla, who retains faculty titles in both equally the School of Engineering and the Business, Data and Studying Sciences (OILS) software, is no stranger to examining the matter of company and changing the way engineering is taught. In 2018, she gained an NSF Occupation Award for “Framing and Reframing Agency in Earning and Engineering (Body).” She (along with Chi) also was one of the researchers on the recently-concluded “Facets: Formation of Achieved Chemical Engineers for Reworking Society” task that concentrated on reworking engineering training.

She reported in this challenge, the staff will take a look at the agency pupils may well have, differentiating concerning “lower agency” and “consequential agency,” which is described as getting and taking up chances to make decisions that are consequential to how learners understand, to what learners discover, and to the studying routines them selves.

“In the context of a laboratory experiment, this indicates that students can make decisions that impact later measures of their perform,” she explained. “For instance, if students decide on some parameters of their experiment, this impacts the knowledge they obtain and the types of investigation they will do.”

Chi reported the crux of this new challenge is associated to that wide purpose of the former Aspects examine of deciding how most effective to have an impact on engineering students and how to interact them all over the undergraduate method.

“We want to discover out the varieties of matters that inspire pupils and inevitably establish curriculum that supports those procedures, not just in lab classes but also in lecture programs, which can feel especially impersonal,” she reported.

The venture will examine current higher-division, undergraduate laboratory experiments throughout two chemical engineering applications — one particular at UNM and one at Montana Point out. Students will be assessed working with what is called the Agency Ranges in Finding out Chances Software that will measure students’ perceptions of company and engineering identity by using study concerns.

“We are seeking to much better fully grasp how this kind of courses can better assistance scholar advancement toward impartial challenge-fixing and communication, hence producing graduates superior well prepared for the problems of qualified engineering,” Svihla stated.

Chi mentioned an additional component of this job is the capacity to test strategies on different populations of college students. UNM, remaining a Hispanic-Serving Establishment, is a varied group with a large populace of underrepresented college students.

“It will be fascinating to see if there are variations in results based mostly on racial, ethnic, gender or socioeconomic factors,” Chi said.

Following the info is gathered and analyzed, Chi said a vital component of the job will be to get the term out in the education and engineering group, by means of conferences, publications and workshops, with the intent of disrupting the way that engineering has historically been taught and supplying a framework for curriculum and program style transformation.

“In my possess instructing, I see this information and facts presently in the qualifications of how I train,” she explained.

Svihla mentioned the workforce will be certain that the suggestions they make are ultimately possible for faculty to put into practice.

“One approach for increasing agency is to use study course-based mostly investigation initiatives, but this is overwhelming for numerous school. In distinction, we are doing reports to look into more compact, a lot more possible variations that can have a massive effects,” she said.

The venture commenced Feb. 1 and continues by way of Jan. 31, 2026.