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In the engineering ethics education literature, there has recently been increasing interest in longitudinal studies of engineering students’ moral development. Understanding how first-year engineering students perceive ethics can provide baseline information critical for understanding their moral development during their subsequent journey in engineering learning. Existing studies have mainly examined how first-year engineering students perceive the structure and elements of ethics curricula, pregiven ethics scenarios, what personal ethical beliefs and specific political ideals they hold (e.g., fairness and political involvement), and institutional ethical climates. Complementary to existing studies, our project surveyed how first-year engineering students perceive professional ethical values. Specifically, we asked students to list the three most important values for defining a good engineer. This question responds to a gap in existing engineering ethics literature that engineering students’ perceptions (especially first-year students) of professional virtues and values are not sufficiently addressed. We argue that designing effective and engaged ethics education experiences needs to consider the professional values perceived by students and how these values are related to the values communicated in the engineering curriculum. This paper is part of a larger project that compares how engineering students develop moral reasoning and intuition longitudinally across three cultures/countries: the United States, Netherlands, and China. We hope that findings from this paper can be useful for engineering educators to reflect on and design subsequent ethics education programs that are more responsive to students’ perceptions of professional values when beginning an engineering program.
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Complexity, Right Action, and the Engineering Curriculum
oday’s engineering students face a very different world than their predecessors. As engineering has adapted to a more global and interconnected economy, the issues that face today’s engineers have become more complex. In a highly networked world notions of the impact of an engineer’s actions on others, the basis for moral and ethical behavior, also become more complex. The definition of complex here captures higher-order and emergent behaviors, situations that can change rapidly, limitations to predictability, and behavior arising from interactions rather than innate to components. While ethics has remained central to engineering education and in general has retained its deontological basis, the ideas the serve as the basis for engineering ethics have changed over time and can be expected to change in the future. The fact that the future ethical challenges that engineering students will face will be distributed and complex while most engineering curricula focus on simplified systems and decisions indicates emerging challenges for effectively addressing engineering ethics within the curriculum. Frameworks that distinguish simple and complicated from complex systems—in which outcomes are more uncertain—emphasize that action becomes more important than knowledge. In other words, it is more important to do what is right, even if one’s actions are imperfect, than know what is right to do. This paper explores the intersection of engineering curricula and engineering ethics from the perspective of “right action”, that is being able in act in ways that lead to ethical outcomes. It is argued that by focusing predominately on knowledge and situating learning in academic settings engineering curricula miss opportunities for developing capabilities for action. Through this lens the opportunities to address engineering ethics in the curriculum are seen to lie predominately outside traditional coursework.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1745922
- PAR ID:
- 10190507
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- American Society for Engineering Engineering Education Annual Conference and Exhibition
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/10.18260/1-2--34317
