Effects of Different Safety Training Methods on Students’ Unsafe Behavior in the Laboratory

Unsafe behavior in the laboratory is a major cause of laboratory accidents. University administrators or laboratory supervisors have introduced various forms of safety training to reduce students’ unsafe behaviors. However, there are insufficient data to substantiate the effectiveness of the implemented safety training programs. To explore the effectiveness of safety training, we introduced centralized and dispersed safety training methods and compared the effects of the two training methods on students’ unsafe behaviors. Centralized training is a comprehensive training method that incorporates a well-structured knowledge system. This method is implemented at the commencement of the semester. Dispersed training exhibits a fragmented structure, with its content being determined by the course experiments and distributed across the semester. By segmenting the experiment process and categorizing unsafe behavior, we studied the incidence of students’ unsafe behaviors and risk profile for different training methods. The data show that the effects of centralized training in reducing unsafe behaviors seem to be limited. In contrast, dispersed training seems to be effective in reducing the incidence of most unsafe behaviors in the laboratory, thereby reducing safety risks. The statistics show a significant difference between centralized and dispersed training in reducing students’ unsafe behaviors. These results indicate that dispersed training has a positive impact on reducing students’ unsafe behaviors and is more appropriate for application in pharmaceutical chemistry laboratories.