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Modern means of assessment require approaches that consider fair and equitable means of determining students' understanding and performance. For example, students frequently connect exams to stress and anxiety, which can lead to an inability to demonstrate their mastery of the subject matter, and thus believe exams to provide inaccurate representation of their ability level. From a motivational viewpoint, centering the focus of a course on what is necessary to achieve the highest grade drives students to focus more on numerical scores as the primary description of their ability rather than on the breadth and depth of their learning. Effectively, by having student motivation focused on grade points rather than course concepts, the course outcomes become achieving a grade instead of achieving student understanding. Ungrading provides an approach that shifts the emphasis of each course back onto learning and what students should be able to do at the end of a course. Grades are de-emphasized in exchange for greater levels of discussion and feedback focused on how well students have learned, processed, and applied the instruction in the course. There are many approaches to ungrading, such as contract grading, but the broader approach allows an instructor to provide less stressful, more equitable assessment. In a process control course, an ungrading method was applied that eliminated exams and most deadlines in the course. Students were provided a number of optional problems and exercises that could be conducted that aligned with each of the course outcomes. Exercises could be submitted for feedback throughout the semester, allowing students to correct their work and assemble a completed portfolio of work demonstrating their mastery over the course outcomes at the end of the semester. In process control, course outcomes could be completed by work on a semester-long course project, while other exercises were simply homework and exam problems from previous iterations of the course restructured to allow students to process their understanding and better apply their skills for a more considered performance of understanding. Students completed a number of self-assessment assignments throughout the semester, and a final grade was determined for each student in discussion with the instructor based on a reasoned consideration of their efforts and completed correct work. This paper will discuss these ungrading efforts in the course, student feedback throughout the semester, and recommendations for other instructors interested in applying an ungrading approach in their courses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Curriculum Committee of AIChE's Education Division surveyed chemical engineering departments across the United States and Canada in Fall 2021 about material and energy balances (MEB) courses. Courses have been described by 84 faculty at 75 institutions. MEB is taught primarily to first-term sophomores (78% of schools) majoring in only chemical engineering (46% of schools). Over 70% of the schools require only one MEB course, and 24% require two courses. All schools require general chemistry as a prerequisite, with half requiring Calculus II (integrals). Faculty do not expect incoming MEB students to be experienced or proficient in any software packages, but they are expected to be at least novices in word processing, spreadsheets, and presentation software. Over 40% of schools expect at least novicelevel understanding of computerized algebra systems, primarily MATLAB. Schools provide students with computer labs, with almost 60% of schools maintaining the labs at the college level. Exams and homework are the most popular assessments, appearing in over 90% of courses. Over half of the courses also have pre-announced quizzes, and team homework is used in 45% of the courses. In a majority of the courses (67%), twenty percent or fewer of the assignments are completed with a computer. The Felder, Rousseau, and Bullard textbook is used in nearly 80% of the courses. Textbook topics through energy balances on reactive systems are covered in over 70% of courses. Only the topics of computer-aided balance calculations and transient balances receive low coverage, in under 50% of the courses. Second courses in MEB tend to emphasize energy balances. In professional skills, only formal problem-solving strategies are covered in over half of the courses. Lecture section sizes are 40 students or smaller for over half of the reporting courses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Northeastern University specializes in opportunities for experiential learning, both through a coop program as well as through direct coursework. The style of experiential and inquiry-based learning have been particularly reinforced through two intermediate-level Unit Operations courses, in which students have been tasked with developing experiments, selecting measurement parameters, and designing analysis. Students' previous experiences have been utilized in the development of final projects for their Process Control course. In order to provide a culmination of the entire Process Control course and to challenge students to design a complete controls system relying on some combination of feedback, feedforward, and/or cascade control, a final project was designed to connect the concept of Control to a real-world system. Student teams were given the option of selecting from six different modules they had observed and analyzed in a previous laboratory course, including distillation, liquid-liquid extraction, heat exchangers, reverse osmosis, and water remediation. These modules had required complete manual control, and had a range of parameters that could be adjusted during operation. For their final project, students were challenged to design a complete control system that required them to select control variables, handle multiple disturbances, and operate within acceptable limits. Students derived overall balances, designed block diagrams, calculated tuning parameters both by hand and through simulation software, and analyzed their proposed control system for stability and economic viability. The project culminated in both a technical written report and a presentation. Across three semesters and multiple sections, every team has designed a different system resulting in different quality of control. Requiring the students to defend their design decisions and forcing them to account for a range of disturbances has helped students develop a much more complete grasp of Process Control and given them greater confidence exiting the course. This presentation will provide examples of the modules and assessment of the project. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ConcepTest questions are frequently used in chemical engineering instruction, in part because of their availability through learning repositories like LearnChemE.com and AIChE Concept Warehouse. ConcepTests evaluate the readers' understanding by integrating the concepts into questions that force the learners to evaluate their own arguments for certain multiple-choice answers while selecting one final answer. Thus, the learners' considered reasoning before selecting an answer allows for evaluation of conceptual understanding. However, few ConcepTests have been developed for Process Control courses. As an extra credit assignment in a Process Control course at Northeastern University, students were given the opportunity to write ConcepTest questions of their own for use with future iterations of students. Students had to develop multiple choice questions with detailed solutions, and were allowed to develop the ConcepTests with respect to any concepts in the course. Nearly 90 students out of almost 260 over four semesters of the course developed questions that were then used throughout the following semester. This study discusses the range of questions created, the benefit of having students develop their own questions, and their implementation in future semesters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The use of comics as an educational teaching tool is a practice that has existed for several decades but only recently begun to be utilized in STEM fields. The dramatic expansion in STEM comics through independent artists, book series, and video animation has illustrated the opportunity for the integration of art into STEM to improve educational approaches. Despite a continued general perception that comics are 'childish', comics have a unique and demonstrated potential for improving student enthusiasm, confidence, and understanding in complex concepts. The use of comics directly addresses one of the major obstacles to effective learning in chemical engineering education, in that many core concepts have an abstract nature with no obvious visual representation (such as fugacity) or have such complexity that the visual depiction is crucial for student understanding (such as thermodynamic cycles). Examples of real-world applications, demonstrations and experimentation can often help to facilitate learning, but presenting a visual learning tool that students can frequently return to can help make the concepts less abstract and more comprehensible. Further, by depicting characters that students can directly identify with, and utilizing dialogue that includes common questions asked by students, comics provide an opportunity for further engagement that other teaching tools do not have. In several chemical engineering courses at Northeastern University, comics have been integrated into courses to help facilitate improvement in student interest, confidence, and comprehension. Comics were produced in collaboration with professional artists as well as comics developed by the students themselves in their classes. Analyses of the impact of the comics has indicated a substantial improvement in student interest and confidence, while student understanding has either held steady or also improved depending on how the comics were integrated into the courses. This paper will discuss the development of these comics, different methods for implementing comics into courses, and the impact of the comics on student learning experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the truly distinctive elements of a chemical engineering undergraduate experience is working with larger-scale process equipment in a laboratory setting. Unit Operations courses seek to expose students to the type and scale of equipment they are likely to see in industry and to equip them with the ability to analyze the behavior of these systems as well as have a true "feel" for how they work (or don't work quite as expected). For the 2017 survey, the AIChE Education Division Survey Committee focused on the laboratory portion of the chemical engineering undergraduate curriculum. Over 70 programs completed the survey, which asked about course structure, hours, and experiments. The typical undergraduate takes one or two laboratory-focused courses within chemical engineering, completes experiments as part of a team, and has at least some exposure to pilot-scale equipment. Virtual experiments make up about 10% of control system experiments and are otherwise relatively uncommon. This paper reports on the survey's key findings as well as some of the highlights of innovative laboratory experience and pedagogy discussed in the results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]