Work in Progress: Finding the Holes in Safety Education

The construction industry is inherently a riskier workplace than the average office job. The high-risk activities, such as work at elevation, often in complex and dynamic environments, tend to create more injuries and fatal accidents. According to the 2018 fatalities report from Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), forty percent of the total fatal hazards were related to falling. Many different safety training programs have been developed to reduce this risk. In addition to OSHA oversight, numerous initiatives from academia, insurance companies, and others in the construction industry have developed assorted computer programs and training modules to decrease fall accidents. In recent years, gamification in safety education using technologies have been introduced to enhance active learning as well. It is essential to use these tools only when they provide value. This study is examining efforts made to create safety training games, both in virtual reality and phone/tablet-based applications, to see what the gaps in these attempts are. This work in progress is part of a process to evaluate the effectiveness of existing and any potential new developments in this area for construction safety education. Industry leaders on the Construction Advisory Board at Texas State University have told researchers that fall prevention is their major construction safety concern, and so the scope of this investigation is on the training for fall prevention. In this preliminary phase, the most traditional method of fall prevention training, the classroom lecture, was evaluated for baseline efficacy. Having a baseline value allows for future comparisons of efficacy of various game-based methods. Students in the Construction Safety class took the OSHA fall prevention questionnaire at the start of the Spring 2021 semester to determine their preexisting knowledge in this area, received instruction in via a standard lecture, and then took the questionnaire again to measure learning gains. The pre- and post- instruction questionnaires also allow investigation as to fall prevention topics that remain challenging for students to learn/remember. Future work will include student testing of existing computer games and a pilot VR game experience that incorporates the findings of this initial phase.