More Like this

1. Curriculum Design for a Professional Development Program to Enhance STEM Researchers’ Capacity to Identify and Address the Ethical Dimensions of Their Work

   https://doi.org/10.18260/1-2--56189  

   Clancy, Rockwell; Zhu, Qin; Lee, Lisa; Jenkins, Iris (June 2025, ASEE Conferences)

   It is emphasized in national legislation, such as the America COMPETES Act and the more recent CHIPS and Science Act, that research integrity is considered essential to the competitiveness and innovation of the U.S. economy. Various stakeholders, particularly research universities, have been developing interventions and programs to foster an ethical culture in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) research and practice among faculty and students. Dominant approaches to research ethics education have historically been shaped by biomedical ethics and the broader ethics of science, placing significant emphasis on misconduct of individual researchers, including the falsification, fabrication, and plagiarism (FFP) of research results. Although these approaches have contributed to promoting ethical conduct among individual researchers, we argue that they still face several challenges. Most notably, due to their narrow scope, traditional research ethics education approaches fail to consider the role of disciplinary cultures in shaping research ethics issues. Additionally, they do not leverage the agency of STEM researchers to identify and address these issues or to generate scalable and sustainable impacts within institutions. To address these issues, this paper introduces the IREI (Innovative Research and Ethical Impact) project, which provides an institutional transformation approach to research ethics education for faculty in STEM fields. This approach aims to transform the institutional culture for ethical STEM research by helping faculty develop and enhance their capacity to identify and address ethical issues in their daily work, while generating scalable and sustainable impacts by leveraging their social networks. More specifically, this paper introduces the curriculum design for a professional development workshop for STEM faculty, which is a key component of the IREI project. This faculty development workshop begins by broadening the understanding of ethics, shifting the focus from aligning the conduct of individual researchers with predetermined ethical principles to the impacts of their actions on the lives of others, as well as on the broader environment and society. This expanded definition is used for two main reasons. First, it emphasizes that it is the actions themselves that ultimately affect others, rather than merely a researcher’s intent or the ethical justification of their behavior. Second, it highlights that future potential impacts are as crucial in research as present, actual impacts—if not more so—since research is intrinsically novel and often future-oriented. Based on this definition, researchers are introduced to steps in the research process, from formulating questions to disseminating results. Participants are then provided with reflective tools and hands-on activities to enhance their ethical sensitivity and expertise throughout the entire research process. This enables them to identify (1) who is affected by their research at various stages and how they are impacted, and (2) strategies to maximize positive effects while minimizing any negative consequences. Finally, faculty are provided with mentoring opportunities to incorporate these reflective insights into broader impacts statements of their own research proposals and projects. Given that these statements directly pertain to their research, we hope that participants will view this workshop as both significant and relevant, as they have a natural interest in making their statements as clear and compelling as possible. 

   more » « less
2. Ways of Experiencing Ethics in Engineering Practice: Variation and Factors of Change

   https://doi.org/10.18260/1-2--35495  

   Zoltowski, Carla B Fila (June 2020, ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition)

   Engineering education researchers have identified a lack of alignment between the complexities of professional engineering contexts and the ways that we train and evaluate the ethical abilities and dispositions of engineers preparing for professional practice. The challenges that engineers face as practitioners are multifaceted, wicked problems situated in unique and varied disciplinary and industry contexts. Understanding the variations in ways of experiencing ethics by practicing engineers in these complex professional contexts will support a better alignment between engineering ethics instruction and what students might experience in professional practice. While there is a need for richer and more contextually-specific ethics training for many areas, our initial focus is the healthcare products industry. Thus, our NSF-funded CCE STEM project will enable us to analyze the alignment of relationships among frameworks for ethics education in engineering and the reality of engineering practice within the health products industry. As a first phase, the project has focused on understanding the different ways in which practicing engineers experience ethical issues in the health products industry using phenomenography, an empirical research methodology for investigating qualitatively different ways people experience a phenomenon. In the second phase, we have analyzed critical incidents that potentially cause the variation in experiencing ethics in practice. The findings of these studies are anticipated to serve as a guidepost for aligning educational strategies and developing effective training for future ethical practitioners. In our paper, we present an overview of the study (background and methods), progress to date, and how we expect the results to inform engineering ethics education and industry ethics training. 

   more » « less
3. Assessing Awareness and Competency of Engineering Freshmen on Ethical and Responsible Research and Practices

   1. Brahmbhatt*, P. (June 2022, Proceedings of the American Society for Engineering Education)

   This paper presents the initial work of a recently funded NSF project on ethical and responsible research and practices in science and engineering. The objective of this research is to improve instructor training, interventions, and student outcomes in high schools and universities to improve awareness and commitment to ethical practices in STEM coursework. The project will generate a robust snapshot of the ethical knowledge, reasoning skills, attitudes, and practices of several thousand undergraduate engineering students. This snapshot will inform the development of a three-week enrichment opportunity for high school STEM teachers. Working with university faculty and graduate students, these teachers will develop learning modules on ethical issues related to their courses. The snapshot will also identify gaps and guide the creation of targeted interventions that will be used in second-, third-, and fourth-year engineering courses. This data-driven project uses a mixed-methods approach to generate a better understanding of the impact of ethics interventions at various points in a student's academic development by developing and using a set of instruments to measure cognitive, affective, and behavioral aspects of ethical competency and self-efficacy. To that end, a second snapshot will be taken by testing and surveying engineering students in their capstone courses to provide a broad overview of the competence and self-confidence that engineering students have in dealing with ethical STEM issues, to determine the efficacy of various interventions, and to improve future interventions. Utilizing repeated measures and possessing a longitudinal dimension, the project will generate extensive data about the development of ethical competency, ethical self-efficacy, and their relationship. The interventions designed for secondary and tertiary classrooms will build on best practices for micro-insertion of ethics content that are practical and help students understand how technical competencies fit within broader social, economic, and environmental contexts. The capstone snapshot will also provide some measure of the impact of other experiences (e.g., undergraduate research, internships, service learning) and courses (e.g., humanities, social science, and business courses) on development of ethical practices. This report marks the start of a five-year project; therefore, the results presented in this paper represent findings from the engineering ethics literature and baseline results from survey of engineering freshmen at Texas A&M University. The findings from the survey are being utilized in developing intervention modules that will be integrated in upper-level engineering courses and training materials for high school teachers. 

   more » « less
4. Where ethics is taught: an institutional epidemiology

   https://doi.org/10.1007/s40889-021-00121-7  

   Beever, Jonathan; Kuebler, Stephen M.; Collins, Jordan (March 2021, International Journal of Ethics Education)

   null (Ed.)

   The goal of this project is to argue for ethics as a necessary component of the institutional health. The authors offer an epidemiology of ethics for a large, metropolitan, very-high-research-activity (R1) university in the U.S. Where epidemiology of a pandemic looks at quantifiable data on infection and exposure rates, control, and broad implications for public health, an epidemiology of ethics looks to parallel data on those same themes. Their hypothesis is that knowing more about how undergraduates are exposed to ethics will help us understand to what extent they are infected with interest in ethics literacy, and potentially what immunity they develop against unethical and unprofessional conduct. These data also tell a story about the ethical health of institutions: to what extent its members are empowered to cultivate a culture of ethics and inoculated against ethical missteps. The authors argue that pro-ethics inoculation at research institutions is shaped by issues of complexity (space given to “hard” vs. “soft” skills within curricula), connotation (differences in meaning of “ethics” among and within disciplines), and collaboration (tensions between Ethics-Across-the-Curriculum and Ethics-In-the-Disciplines approaches to ethics). These issues make assessment of where ethics is taught all the more difficult. The methodology used in this project can readily be taken up by other institutions, with much to be learned from inter-institutional comparisons about the distribution of ethics across the curriculum and within the disciplines. 

   more » « less
5. Exploring Perceptions of Ethics and Social Responsibility Among Engineering Students and Professionals: Research Highlights and Implications for the Field

   Jesiek, B.; Claussen, S.; Kim, D.; Stepback, L.; Zoltowski, C. B. (January 2022, ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition)

   Ethics and social responsibility are often viewed as key areas of concern for many engineering educators and professional engineers. Thus, it is important to consider how students and professionals understand and navigate ethical issues, explore how such perceptions and abilities change over time, and investigate if certain types of interventions and experiences (e.g., coursework, training, service activities, etc.) impact individual participants. The breadth of engineering as a profession also raises questions about how ethics and social responsibility are understood across a wide range of disciplines, subfields, and industry sectors. Recognizing a need for more empirical research to address such questions, our research team carried out a five year, longitudinal, mixed-methods study to explore students’ perceptions of ethics and social responsibility. This study relied on repeated use of quantitative measures related to ethics, along with qualitative interviews to explore how students’ perceptions of these issues change across time, between institutions, and in response to participation in certain experiences. Additionally, we are now initiating a follow-on study where we will collect survey and interview data from our previous participants now that most of them are in full-time job roles and/or pursuing graduate degrees, as well as from a new group of early career engineers to enlarge our sample. In this paper, we first give an overview of key research findings from our ongoing research that have been published or are under review. The second major part of this paper delves into some specific theoretical and methodological questions and challenges associated with our research. This paper will likely be of interest to educators and researchers who are involved with developing and/or evaluating ethical capabilities among engineering students. 

   more » « less