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1. Early Career Engineers’ Views of Ethics and Social Responsibility: Study Overview

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

   null (Ed.)

   Amidst growing concerns about a lack of attention to ethics in engineering education and professional practice, a variety of formal course-based interventions and informal or extracurricular programs have been created to improve the social and ethical commitments of engineering graduates. To supplement the formal and informal ethics education received as undergraduate students, engineering professionals often also participate in workplace training and professional development activities on ethics, compliance, and related topics. Despite this preparation, there is growing evidence to suggest that technical professionals are often challenged to navigate ethical situations and dilemmas. Some prior research has focused on assessing the impacts of a variety of learning experiences on students’ understandings of ethics and social responsibility, including the PIs’ prior NSF-funded CCE STEM study which followed engineering students through the four years of their undergraduate studies using both quantitative and qualitative research methods. This prior project explored how the students’ views on these topics changed across demographic groups, over time, between institutions, and due to specific interventions. Yet, there has been little longitudinal research on how these views and perceptions change (or do not change) among engineers during the school-to-work transition. Furthermore, there has been little exploration of how these views are influenced by the professional contexts in which these engineers work, including cultures and norms prevalent in different technical fields, organizations, and industry sectors. This NSF-supported Ethical and Responsible Research (ER2) study responds to these gaps in the literature by asking: RQ1) How do perceptions of ethics and social responsibility change in the transition from undergraduate engineering degree programs to the workplace (or graduate studies), and how are these perceptions shaped or influenced?, and RQ2) How do perceptions of ethics and social responsibility vary depending on a given individual’s engineering discipline/background and current professional setting? This paper gives an overview of the research project, describing in particular the longitudinal, mixed-methods study design which will involve collecting and analyzing data from a large sample of early career engineers. More specifically, we will present the proposed study contexts, timeline, target subject populations, and procedures for quantitative and qualitative data collection and analysis. We will also describe how this study leverages our prior project, thereby allowing unique longitudinal comparisons that span participants’ years as an engineering undergraduate student to their time as an early-career professional. Through this project, we aim to better understand how early career engineers’ perceptions of social and ethical responsibility are shaped by their prior experiences and current professional contexts. This paper will likely be of particular interest to scholars who teach or research engineering ethics, social responsibility, and professional practice. 

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2. Complexity, Right Action, and the Engineering Curriculum

   https://doi.org/10.18260/1-2--34317  

   Cheville, R. A. ; Heywood, J. ( June 2020 , American Society for Engineering Engineering Education Annual Conference and Exhibition)

   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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3. Conducting the Pilot Study of Integrating AI: An Experience Integrating Machine Learning into Upper Elementary Robotics Learning (Work in Progress)

   Xu, G. ; Zabner, D. ; Cross, J. ; Nadler, D. ; Coxon, S. ; Engelkenjohn, K. ( June 2023 , ASEE annual conference exposition proceedings)

   Artificial Intelligence (AI) enhanced systems are widely adopted in post-secondary education, however, tools and activities have only recently become accessible for teaching AI and machine learning (ML) concepts to K-12 students. Research on K-12 AI education has largely included student attitudes toward AI careers, AI ethics, and student use of various existing AI agents such as voice assistants; most of which has focused on high school and middle school. There is no consensus on which AI and Machine Learning concepts are grade-appropriate for elementary-aged students or how elementary students explore and make sense of AI and ML tools. AI is a rapidly evolving technology and as future decision-makers, children will need to be AI literate[1]. In this paper, we will present elementary students’ sense-making of simple machine-learning concepts. Through this project, we hope to generate a new model for introducing AI concepts to elementary students into school curricula and provide tangible, trainable representations of ML for students to explore in the physical world. In our first year, our focus has been on simpler machine learning algorithms. Our desire is to empower students to not only use AI tools but also to understand how they operate. We believe that appropriate activities can help late elementary-aged students develop foundational AI knowledge namely (1) how a robot senses the world, and (2) how a robot represents data for making decisions. Educational robotics programs have been repeatedly shown to result in positive learning impacts and increased interest[2]. In this pilot study, we leveraged the LEGO® Education SPIKE™ Prime for introducing ML concepts to upper elementary students. Through pilot testing in three one-week summer programs, we iteratively developed a limited display interface for supervised learning using the nearest neighbor algorithm. We collected videos to perform a qualitative evaluation. Based on analyzing student behavior and the process of students trained in robotics, we found some students show interest in exploring pre-trained ML models and training new models while building personally relevant robotic creations and developing solutions to engineering tasks. While students were interested in using the ML tools for complex tasks, they seemed to prefer to use block programming or manual motor controls where they felt it was practical. 

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4. 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. 

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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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