Daily pre-work safety training for workers is essential due to their exposure to various hazardous factors. However, existing training methods often fail to effectively deliver information in a way that supports workers’ learning and comprehension, resulting in poor job performance and a lack of adherence to safety protocols. This study explores a novel approach to structuring safety training by examining the cognitive characteristics of workers in relation to the placement order and composition of training materials. An educational recall experiment involving 660 construction workers was conducted to evaluate the impact of training material design on content retention. The results showed that the average number of recalls was significantly higher when the training content was structured according to the actual work sequence, compared to content organized in a random order. Additionally, separating execution standards from safety standards led to better recall than when the two were integrated. These findings highlight the importance of aligning training materials with workers’ cognitive processing patterns. This study contributes to both theory and practice by providing evidence-based guidance for improving pre-work safety training. The proposed method offers a practical solution for small- and medium-sized construction companies that often lack the resources to develop effective training materials.

Numerous factors affect the soil pressure distributions around buried pipes, including the shape, size, and stiffness of the pipe, burial depth, and the stiffness of the surrounding soil. Additionally, to some extent, a pipe can benefit from the soil arching effect, where the overburden and surcharge pressure at the crown can be supported by the adjacent soil. As a result, a buried pipe only needs to support the portion of the load that is not transferred to the adjacent soil. This paper presents numerical investigations of the soil pressure distributions around buried concrete pipes and crack propagation under different environmental conditions, such as loading, saturation level, and the presence of voids. To this end, a nonlinear elastoplastic model for backfill materials was implemented using finite element software and a user-defined subroutine. Three different backfill materials and two different native soils were selected to examine the material-specific behaviors of concrete pipes, including soil pressure distributions and crack propagation. For each backfill material, the effects of the loading type, groundwater, and voids were investigated. These simulation results provide helpful information regarding pressure redistribution and buried concrete pipe behavior under various environmental conditions.