Construction safety simulations and students' perception of stress

It has been stated that safety education, as a priority for construction management students, often has not been high. Safety education can be fairly unreal in that it focuses exclusively on safety issues and safety training, which is primarily based on safety rules, and does not lead to the required improvement.

For construction managers in real world situations, safety issues can be side issues interwoven into other activities, which are usually given priority. This leads to ill-structured and complex workplace problems which has implications for engineering education in that students should be required to learn how to reconcile and manage conflicting constraints. The authors of this paper propose to supplement safety education with simulations of real world construction situations, which include social aspects such as communication with other project members, tasks not directly related to safety issues, and stress caused by time pressure. However, a question arises, 'How do students perceive an increased level of stress caused by the simulation'?

The remainder of the paper summarizes the background regarding stress in simulations and learning, followed by the paper's purpose, method, discussion and conclusions.