(376g) Development of a Visual Library for Chemical Process Safety Education: Introduction to Sketchnoting

The ability to acquire visual thinking competency offers students a powerful and unique opportunity to engage with the discourse of their discipline (Rau, 2017). Many STEM disciplines and specifically chemical engineering relies on the ability interpret knowledge visually. Although engineering students are exposed to countless figures and diagrams in textbooks, lectures, and labs (Kelly & Akaygun, 2019), and rely on these representations to make meaning of course content, they are not explicitly taught how to develop visualizations on their own (diSessa, 2004). This creates a gap, termed a ‘representation dilemma’ (Rau, 2017), between understanding a visual and using that visual as an aid for learning new content. One way to overcome this problem is to develop students’ visual representation competency (Dickmann et al., 2019). We are undertaking a project to address the representation dilemma problem by providing chemical engineering students with explicit instruction on sketchnoting, a method for visual thinking and notetaking, within the context of a core chemical engineering course, Chemical Process Safety.

This poster will describe our implementation of sketchnoting in a chemical process safety course, based on an implementation strategy for enhancing visual thinking skills in STEM courses (Gansemer-Topf, Paepcke-Hjeltness, Russell & Schiltz, 2021). The poster will include a description of the steps taken to develop a visual library of commonly used course terms (e.g., hazard, incident, pressure, people) and notetaking flags (e.g., equation, revisit, checkpoint), and the approach taken to embed explicit sketchnoting instruction sessions into the course.

References cited

Dickmann, T., Opfermann, M., Dammann, E., Lang, M. & Rumann, S. (2019). What you see is what you learn? The role of visual model comprehension for academic success in chemistry. Chemistry Education Research and Practice. 20, 804-820.

diSessa, A. A. (2004). Metarepresentation: Native competence and targets for instruction. Cognition and Instruction, 22(3), 293-331.

Gansemer-Topf, A.M., Paepcke-Hjeltness, V., Russell, A.E. & Schiltz J. “Drawing” your Own Conclusions: Sketchnoting as a Pedagogical Tool for Teaching Ecology. Innov High Educ 46, 303–319 (2021).

Kelly, R. & Akaygun S. (2019). Chemistry Education Research and Practice 20, 657-658.