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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. 

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2. Responsibility and Accountability: Faculty Leaders, Ethics Frameworks, and Disciplinary Enculturation

   Pinkert, L.; Beever, J.; Kuebler, S.; Taylor, L.E.; Vazquez, E.; Milanes, V. (June 2023, 2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition)

   What responsibility do faculty leaders have to understand the ethics frameworks of their faculty colleagues? To what extent do leaders have capacity to enact that responsibility, given constraints on curricular space, expertise, basic communication skills, and the political climate? The landscape of disciplinary ethics frameworks, or the value content and structured experiences that shape professional development and disciplinary enculturation, reaches wide across the curriculum and deep into the discipline [1][2][3]. This landscape might include frameworks ranging from accrediting bodies and institutional compliance structures to state and national laws and departmental cultures. Coupled to the diversity of specializations within a single discipline, this landscape is richly complex. Yet, faculty leaders play important roles in shaping departmental and programmatic cultures, which are at least partially informed by the disciplinary value landscape. The objective of this paper is to build on previous work [4] to explore this problem of faculty leader responsibility by contrasting faculty leaders’ perspectives on disciplinary values with the values evidenced by their professional organizations. To evidence this contrast, we compare data from interviews with faculty leaders in departments of biology and computer science at a large metropolitan high research intensive HSI-serving university against data scraped from the websites of professional organizations those leaders reference as ethics frameworks. We analyze both sets of data using content analytics methods to examine qualitative and quantitative differences between them. This comparison is part of a larger institutional study looking at this problem across a wide diversity of disciplines [5]. We find an anticipated disparity between identification of the disciplinary frameworks and their content, opening space for discussion about the impact of national ethics frameworks at the local disciplinary level. But we also find an unanticipated diversity of types of ethics frameworks identified by faculty leaders, demonstrating the complexity of just how value frameworks inform disciplinary enculturation through leadership and training. Based on our findings, we articulate the relationship between responsibility and accountability [6] in the process of values-driven disciplinary enculturation. This work is relevant to ethics in that if ethics frameworks and the values they encode play a role in disciplinary enculturation, and there is a disconnect between faculty leaders perceptions of ethics frameworks and their disciplines explicit communications of their values, then the processes and practices of disciplinary enculturation could be more tightly connected to disciplinary values – resulting in more richly ethical professionals. *note: a version of this abstract is also submitted concurrently as a presentation to the Association of Practical and Professional Ethics (APPE), which does not publish abstracts or proceedings papers. [1] Tuana, Nancy. 2013. “Embedding Philosophers in the Practices of Science: Bringing Humanities to the Sciences.” Synthese 190(11): 1955-1973. [2] West, C. and Chur-Hansen, A. (2004). Ethical Enculturation: The Informal and Hidden Ethics Curricula at an Australian Medical School. Focus on Health Professional Education: a Multi-Disciplinary Journal 6(1): 85-99. [3] Nieusma, D. and Cieminski, M. (2018). Ethics Education as Enculturation: Student Learning of Personal, Social, and Professional Responsibility. 2018 ASEE Annual Conference and Exposition. Paper 23665. [4] Pinkert, L.A., Taylor, L., Beever, J., Kuebler, S.M., Klonoff, E. (2022). Disciplinary Leaders Perceptions of Ethics: An Interview-Based Study of Ethics Frameworks. 2022 ASEE Annual Conference and Exposition. https://peer.asee.org/41614. [5] National Science Foundation, “Award Abstract # 2024296 Institutional Transformation: Intersections of Moral Foundations and Ethics Frameworks in STEM Enculturation.” https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=2024296, 2020. 

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3. Comparing engineering ethics education across institutions using case study: Methodological and conceptual problems [Work in Progress]

   Clancy, Rockwell; Zhu, Qin; Streiner, Scott; Thorpe, Ryan (January 2023, 2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition)

   Ethics has long been recognized as crucial to responsible engineering, but the increasingly globalized environments present challenges to effective engineering ethics training. This paper is part of a larger research project that aims to examine the effects of culture and education on ethics training in undergraduate engineering students at universities in the United States, China, and the Netherlands. We are interested in how students’ curricular and extra-curricular (e.g., internships, service projects) experiences and training impact their ethical reasoning and moral dispositions, and how this differs cross-culturally. To understand this, we are conducting mixed methods research longitudinally over four years to engineering students at our participating universities to gauge their moral dispositions and ethical reasoning skills and to measure any change in these. This work-in-progress paper, however, is not about the direct outcomes of this research project. Rather, it critically examines our own practices and methods in doing this research. We begin the paper by briefly introducing the larger research project and motivating the use of comparative, multi-institutional case studies as necessary for contextualizing, complementing, and interpreting quantitative data on ethical reasoning and moral dispositions. Because the conditions related to engineering ethics education differ widely per participating institution for institutional (and also likely cultural) reasons, interpreting and analyzing quantitative survey data will require understanding contextual conditions of education at each institution. Comparative case studies can supply missing contextual information to provide a more complete picture of the engineering ethics educational contexts, strategies, and practices at each of the participating universities. However, in considering how to design and conduct these case studies, we realized we were operating under certain assumptions such as ethics in engineering as separate (and separable from) the “real,” or technical engineering curriculum. These assumptions have been widely problematized in engineering ethics education (Cech, 2014; Tormey et al. 2015; Polmear et al. 2019); they are assumptions that we in our teaching and research attempt to dispel. Our paper considers (and invites discussion on) the broader implications of methodological design in conducting cross-cultural multi-sited case studies in engineering ethics education research. It explores models for designing and conducting our case studies so as not to reproduce pernicious ideas about social and ethical issues in engineering as subsidiary “interventions” in the “actual,” (i.e., technical) curriculum. More generally we discuss how engineering ethics education research methods can be harnessed to overcome this established division. 

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4. Exploring the Perceptions of Professional Values among First-Year Engineering Students: A Cross-Cultural Comparison

   https://doi.org/10.1109/ISTAS55053.2022.10227117  

   Gammon, Andrea; Zhu, Qin; Streiner, Scott; Clancy, Rockwell; Thorpe, Ryan (November 2022, IEEE)

   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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5. Conceptualizing a Theory of Ethical Behavior in Engineering

   Nguyen, L. M.; Poleacovschi, C.; Faust, K. M.; Padgett Walsh, K.; Feinstein, S. G.; Rutherford, C. (January 2020, 2020 ASEE Virtual Annual Conference Content Access)

   Traditional engineering courses typically approach teaching and problem solving by focusing on the physical dimensions of those problems without consideration of dynamic social and ethical dimensions. As such, projects can fail to consider community questions and concerns, broader impacts upon society, or otherwise result in inequitable outcomes. And, despite the fact that students in engineering receive training on the Professional Code of Ethics for Engineers, to which they are expected to adhere in practice, many students are unable to recognize and analyze real-life ethical challenges as they arise. Indeed, research has found that students are typically less engaged with ethics—defined as the awareness and judgment of microethics and macroethics, sensitivity to diversity, and interest in promoting organizational ethical culture—at the end of their engineering studies than they were at the beginning. As such, many studies have focused on developing and improving the curriculum surrounding ethics through, for instance, exposing students to ethics case studies. However, such ethics courses often present a narrow and simplified view of ethics that students may struggle to integrate with their broader experience as engineers. Thus, there is a critical need to unpack the complexity of ethical behavior amongst engineering students in order to determine how to better foster ethical judgment and behavior. Promoting ethical behavior among engineering students and developing a culture of ethical behavior within institutions have become goals of many engineering programs. Towards this goal, we present an overview of the current scholarship of engineering ethics and propose a theoretical framework of ethical behavior using a review of articles related to engineering ethics from 1990-2020. These articles were selected based upon their diversity of scope and methods until saturation was reached. A thematic analysis of articles was then performed using Nvivo. The review engages in theories across disciplines including philosophy, education and psychology. Preliminary results identify two major kinds of drivers of ethical behavior, namely individual level ethical behavior drivers (awareness of microethics, awareness of macroethics, implicit understanding, and explicit understanding) and institutional drivers (diversity and institutional ethical culture). In this paper, we present an overview and discussion of two drivers of ethical behavior at the individual level, namely awareness of microethics and awareness of macroethics, based on a review of 50 articles. Our results indicate that an awareness of both microethics and macroethics is essential in promoting ethical behavior amongst students. The review also points to a need to focus on increasing students’ awareness of macroethics. This research thus addresses the need, driven by existing scholarship, to identify a conceptual framework for explaining how ethical judgment and behavior in engineering can be further promoted. 

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