Learning Benefits of Integrating Socioeconomic and Cultural Considerations into an Onsite Water Reclamation Course Project

During the past decade, our university has offered a senior undergraduate/graduate-level course that focuses on onsite water reclamation covering the selection, design, and implementation of onsite and decentralized treatment systems. A major element used to assess student learning is a culminating project that asks students to critically review an onsite water reclamation or reuse technology, identify lessons learned from an onsite case study, or design an onsite treatment system for a specific application. During course deliveries in 2014 and before, non-technical considerations focused on regulatory requirements and project owner needs. In 2016 and 2017, a different instructor integrated socio-economic and cultural considerations, through course content focused on onsite water, sanitation, and hygiene (WaSH) efforts in developing countries, as a major course theme. To assess whether students valued the integration of non-technical considerations, 22 student projects spanning a period of four academic semesters between 2014 and 2017 were analyzed using two approaches. Projects were analyzed (1) for the degree of integration of non-technical considerations and (2) by term frequency mining and term frequency-inverse document frequency (tf-idf). The integration of socioeconomic and cultural considerations into the course project increased in 2016 and 2017, with five of twelve student teams in 2014 and eight of ten student teams in 2016 and 2017 integrating non-technical considerations in their analysis. Gender demographics and graduate standing were not correlated with the degree of integration of non-technical considerations. Term frequency analysis and tf-idf showed that key terms in the “social” and “energy” categories were used significantly more in the 2016 and 2017 course projects, while use of technical terms did not change. Increasing emphasis and content of nontechnical concepts through integration of WaSH principles appears to have enhanced student consideration of these concepts while maintaining technical content.