More Like this

1. Why Engineering Ethics? How Do Educators and Administrators Justify Teaching Engineering Ethics?

   Fatehiboroujeni, S. ; Akera, A. ; Riley, D. ; Cheville, A. ; Karlin, J. ; Appelhans, S. ; De Pree, T. ( January 2019 , ASEE annual conference & exposition)

   This work-in-progress paper presents preliminary findings on how teaching engineering ethics is justified by academic administrators and policymakers, drawing from data collected in a multi-institution collaborative project called “The Distributed System of Governance in Engineering Education”. The project seeks to understand the practice of engineering education reform using data collected from a larger number of oral interviews at a variety of academic institutions and other organizations in engineering education. Investigations of effective strategies for the ethical development of engineering students have been pursued extensively in engineering education research. Canvassing this literature reveals not only diverse approaches and conceptions of engineering ethics, but also a diverse set of rationales and contexts for justifying the development and implementation of engineering ethics coursework and programs. It is also evident that the students’ ethical development is shaped by how the subject is delivered, e.g., the use of case studies or “best practices”, as well as the underlying reasons given to them about why ethics is taught. Institutions send signals to their students, even without intending to, about the importance of engineering ethics to their professional identity through their choice in how and why they address this matter. Our initial analysis of interview data frommore »over a hundred subjects from more than twenty universities demonstrates the diverse ways in which ethics education is justified. The most common reason offered are satisfying ABET accreditation requirements and complying with the recommendations of a disciplinary professional association (e.g., ASME or ASCE). Resistance to notions such as professional judgment, and the absence of any substantial reference to engineering ethics in general conversations about educational decision making and governance are other initial findings from our work.« less
2. Board 72: Why Engineering Ethics? How Do Educators and Administrators Justify Teaching Engineering Ethics?

   Fatehiboroujeni, S. ( January 2019 , ASEE Annual Conference proceedings)

   This work-in-progress paper presents preliminary findings on how teaching engineering ethics is justified by academic administrators and policymakers, drawing from data collected in a multi-institution collaborative project called “The Distributed System of Governance in Engineering Education”. The project seeks to understand the practice of engineering education reform using data collected from a larger number of oral interviews at a variety of academic institutions and other organizations in engineering education. Investigations of effective strategies for the ethical development of engineering students have been pursued extensively in engineering education research. Canvassing this literature reveals not only diverse approaches and conceptions of engineering ethics, but also a diverse set of rationales and contexts for justifying the development and implementation of engineering ethics coursework and programs. It is also evident that the students’ ethical development is shaped by how the subject is delivered, e.g., the use of case studies or “best practices”, as well as the underlying reasons given to them about why ethics is taught. Institutions send signals to their students, even without intending to, about the importance of engineering ethics to their professional identity through their choice in how and why they address this matter. Our initial analysis of interview data frommore »over a hundred subjects from more than twenty universities demonstrates the diverse ways in which ethics education is justified. The most common reason offered are satisfying ABET accreditation requirements and complying with the recommendations of a disciplinary professional association (e.g., ASME or ASCE). Resistance to notions such as professional judgment, and the absence of any substantial reference to engineering ethics in general conversations about educational decision making and governance are other initial findings from our work.« less
3. Longitudinal Qualitative Case Study of One Engineering Student’s Perceptions of Ethics and Social Responsibility: Corvin’s Story

   Claussen, S. ; Howland, S. J. ; Nittala, S. ; Jesiek, B. K. ; Zoltowski, C. B. ( July 2021 , Proceedings of the 2021 American Society of Engineering Education Virtual Annual Conference)

   Ethics and social responsibility have frequently been identified as important areas of practice for professional engineers. Thus, measuring engineering ethics and social responsibility is critical to assessing the abilities of engineering students, understanding how those abilities change over time, and exploring the impacts of certain ethical interventions, such as coursework or participation in extracurricular activities. However, measurement of these constructs is difficult, as they are complex and multi-faceted. Much prior research has been carried out to develop and assess ethical interventions in engineering education, but the findings have been mixed, in part because of these measurement challenges. To address this variation in prior work, we have designed and carried out a five year, longitudinal, mixed-methods study to explore students’ perceptions of ethics and social responsibility. This study relies on both repeated use of quantitative measures related to ethics and repeated qualitative interviews to explore how students’ perceptions of these issues change across time, between institutions, and in response to participation in certain experiences. This paper focuses on the thematic analysis and preliminary results of the 33 pairs of interviews that were gathered from participants at three different universities in Year 1 and Year 4 of their undergraduate studies. Given themore »multifaceted and complex nature of ethics, measuring and assessing how students’ perceive its various aspects (e.g. those related to ethical climate, moral awareness, moral disengagement etc.) has proven challenging. Furthermore, investigating how students’ perceptions of these concepts vary over time adds another layer of complexity for analyzing our longitudinal data. For example, a student might show increased understanding in one aspect of ethics over time and consistency in another, making it difficult to identify patterns or the impacts of specific influences. Due to this large variation in student experiences and perspectives, we used single case analysis to analyze the longitudinal interviews of a single participant, Corvin. From this analysis, three themes emerged in the student's responses: a shift in his views of engineering ethics and social responsibility from idealism to pragmatism; an adjustment in how he thinks engineers should balance their responsibilities to the public and to their employers; and the characteristics he identifies for ethical engineers. This paper will be beneficial for engineering educators and researchers who are interested in measuring and developing ethical capabilities among engineering students.« less
4. 2022. “Explaining Choice, Persistence, and Attrition of Black Students in Electrical, Computer, and Mechanical Engineering: Award# EEC-1734347. Grantee Poster Session -Year 4.”

   Mobley, Catherine ; Orr, Marisa ; Brawner, Catherine Brent ; Manning, Jessica ; Tidwell, Michael L. ( January 2022 , Proceedings of the 2022 Annual Conference of the American Society for Engineering Education.)

   Our transformative mixed-methods project, funded by the Division of Engineering Education and Centers, responds to calls for more cross-institutional qualitative and longitudinal studies of minorities in engineering education. Our project builds on prior work that demonstrated the impacts of gender and race on academic trajectories in Electrical, Computer, and Mechanical Engineering (EE, CpE, and ME, respectively) to answer the following questions: 1. Why do Black men and women choose and persist in, or leave, EE, CpE, and ME? 2. What are the academic trajectories of Black men and women in EE, CpE, and ME? 3. In what ways do these pathways vary by gender or institution? 4. What institutional policies and practices promote greater retention of Black engineering students? In Year 4 of our project, the research team has engaged in deeper analysis of our quantitative data from the Multi-Institution Database for Investigating Engineering Longitudinal Development (MIDFIELD) database and our qualitative data from 79 in-depth interviews of students in the three study majors at our four study institutions. Expanding on findings presented in prior years, in this paper, we describe emergent results from three papers from Year 4 of our project: • Paper # 1: “Who Tells Your Story? Qualitativemore »Methods for Establishing Connections and Eliciting Narratives” was published in the International Journal of Qualitative Methodology in 2021. It includes a description of the development of the card-sorting activity that students completed to describe their reasons for choosing to major in engineering and an exploration of different ways to analyze the data. Analysis of how frequently the factors influencing the major choice were chosen by interviewees has allowed us to identify those factors that carry the greatest importance for students and how they vary for persisters and switchers. • Paper # 2: “GPA Trends of Black Mechanical Engineering Students”: Our early qualitative work has led to questions about students who switch majors and those who leave the university. We are using the MIDFIELD database to better understand characteristics of students who switch majors and who leave the university. We will use functional cluster analysis to group the GPA trends to find clearly defined groups of students' GPA. Preliminary findings suggest that the students who switch majors have different GPA trends than the students who leave their institutions. This holds true for whether the student chooses to switch their major and stay within engineering and students who choose to leave engineering. • Paper # 3: “Pride and Prestige: Factors Influencing How and Why Black Students Choose to Attend a Predominantly White Institution or a Historically Black University”: In this paper, we explore the reasons that students in our study majors decided to attend either a HBCU or a PWI. Our early analysis revealed that students had diverse reasons for college choice, including affordability, location, familiarity with the institution, family encouragement and connections, and prestige of the university. Our paper will also describe the differences between students who attended a HBCU or PWI in their rationale for deciding to attend a particular university.« less
5. Engineering Ethics Through High-Impact Collaborative/Competitive Scenarios (E-ETHICCS): Initial Results and Lessons Learned.

   Streiner, S ; Burkey, D ; Young, M. ; Cimino, R. ; Pascal, J. ; Dahm, K. ( August 2022 , ASEE Annual Conference proceedings)

   Ethics education has been recognized as increasingly important to engineering over the past two decades, although disagreement exists concerning how ethics can and should be taught in the classroom. With active learning strategies becoming a preferred method of instruction, a collaboration of authors from four universities (University of Pittsburgh, University of Connecticut, Rowan University and New Jersey Institute of Technology) are investigating how game-based or playful learning with strongly situated components can influence first-year engineering students’ ethical knowledge, awareness, and decision making. This paper offers an overview and results of the progress to date of this three year, NSF Improving Undergraduate STEM Education (IUSE) grant that aims to (1) characterize the ethical awareness and decision making of first-year engineering students, (2) develop game-based learning interventions focused on ethical decision making, and (3) determine how (and why) game-based approaches affect students’ ethical awareness in engineering and the advantages of such approaches over non game-based approaches. Now in its second year, the authors have conducted a preliminary analysis of first-year students' ethical knowledge and organization via a concept mapping approach and have measured students' ethical reasoning using the Defining Issues Test 2 (DIT2) and Engineering Ethics Reasoning Instrument (EERI). Further, the authorsmore »have developed a suite of ethics-driven games that have been implemented across three of the universities, engaging over 400 first-year engineering students. Evaluation data has also been gathered for further game development and to assess initial student engagement and learning. Year 1 has provided insight into where first-year engineering students “are at” in terms of ethical knowledge and reasoning when they come to college, and how game-based instruction can be effective in the development of these students into moral agents who understand the consequences of their decisions. Further results from this investigation will provide the engineering education community with a set of impactful and research-based playful learning pedagogy and assessment that will help students confront social and ethical dilemmas in their professional lives.« less