Evaluating and improving safety education for diverse students in university chemistry laboratory

抄録

Singapore Institute of Technology (SIT) is an Applied Learning University that admits students from diverse academic backgrounds and life experiences. Many students who join the Food, Chemical and Biology (FCB) Cluster have limited or no prior exposure to chemistry laboratory work, such as those from Business, Engineering or Junior College. This poses a challenge for safety education, which aims to equip students with the skills and awareness to conduct experiments safely and effectively. To fill up the gap, a Safety Education Program (SEP) was designed and implemented to the new FCB students. The SEP includes three stages, namely priortrimester Bus Stop that includes fundamental laboratory hands-on skills, safety modules on LMS, and in-class safety briefing. To assess the impact of the SEP, we conducted a pre- and post-survey among Year 1 Chemical Engineering students from FCB cluster who completed a laboratory course. In general, the feedback on the effectiveness of SEP is positive. However, the survey results showed that students perceived increased difficulty in following safety instructions specifically after going through the SEP. This showed a gap between theory and practice. A strategy to improve the SEP is proposed based on the survey results and will be evaluated in this study.