Design of a project-based active cooperative course to develop and assess safety culture in undergraduate nuclear engineering programs

Safety culture is an essential requirement for nuclear industry. Nuclear engineering educational programs have a vital role in building, assessing, and evaluating the attainment of the attributes of this culture. For the time being, assessment in such programs is considered in the cognitive domain rather than the use of direct assessments techniques that are involved in the affective domain. In nuclear organizations, on the other hand, security and safety cutlers are measured mainly during practice by monitoring of the professionalism and the deviations from safe or secure environment. In the present work a project-based active cooperative learning course is designed to develop and measure the students´ attainment of the attributes of safety culture. The key elements of the course depend mainly on assessing the confidentiality, transparency, best practices, and other elements of the cutlers through monitoring of the student´s performance and attitudes in real open-ended problems. The assessment methodology relies mainly on behavior and attitude rather than gaining of the knowledge. The course methodology is not limited to nuclear academic programs but could be applied to other industrial training activities.