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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Examining the Relations between Moral Intuitions and Values among First-Year Engineering Students: Implications for Culturally Responsive Ethics Education
Ethics as long been recognized as vital to responsible engineering practice, with research focusing mostly on the effects of ethics pedagogies and programs on ethical reasoning and knowledge. Historically, engineering ethics has tended to be “normative” – telling people how they should think about or behave in engineering. Recent work in moral and cultural psychology has called into question the extent to which ethical judgements are based primarily ethical reasoning. Ethical judgments are also the result of intuitions, emotions, and held values. The authors argue that more empirical research using this perspective is needed to explore first-year engineering students’ ethical intuition. As such, this quantitative and qualitative research study examines the relationship between moral intuitions, measured using the Moral Foundations Questionnaire (MFQ), and student-held values about what is important in the engineering profession.
Around 285 first-year engineering students were surveyed at a public university in the northeast United States as part of a larger research initiative that seeks to understand the effects of diverse cultural and educational experiences on ethical judgements in engineering. This paper reports the findings from a portion of this survey, namely the MFQ and the open-ended question “List three values you think are the most important for defining a good engineer”. Descriptive and correlational analyses are employed to examine meaningful connections between moral intuitions and values. Since moral foundations theory is based on a broader, more inclusive understanding of ethics, results from this research can be more easily generalized, compared, and built on in increasingly cross-cultural settings.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2124984
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10352816
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- 2022 ASEE - North Central Section Conference
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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