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1. Learning to prioritize the public good: Does training in classes, workplaces, and professional societies shape engineers' understanding of their public welfare responsibilities?

   https://doi.org/10.1002/jee.20590  

   Cech, Erin A.; Finelli, Cynthia J. (March 2024, Journal of Engineering Education)

   Abstract BackgroundEngineers are professionally obligated to protect the safety and well‐being of the public impacted by the technologies they design and maintain. In an increasingly complex sociotechnical world, engineering educators and professional institutions have a duty to train engineers in these responsibilities. Purpose/HypothesisThis article asks, where are engineers trained in their public welfare responsibilities, and how effective is this training? We argue that engineers trained in public welfare responsibilities, especially within engineering education, will demonstrate greater understanding of their duty to recognize and respond to public welfare concerns. We expect training in formal engineering classes to be more broadly impactful than training in contexts like work or professional societies. Data/MethodsWe analyze unique survey data from a representative sample of US practicing engineers using descriptive and regression techniques. ResultsConsistent with expectations, engineers who received public welfare responsibility training in engineering classes are more likely than other engineers to understand their responsibilities to protect public health and safety and problem‐solve collectively, to recognize the importance of social consequences and ethical responsibilities in their own jobs, to have noticed ethical issues in their workplace, and to have taken action about an issue that concerned them. Training through other parts of college, workplaces, or professional societies has comparatively little impact. Concerningly, nearly a third of engineers reported never being trained in public welfare responsibilities. ConclusionThese results suggest that training in engineering education can shape engineers' long‐term understanding of their public welfare responsibilities. They underscore the need for these responsibilities to be taught as a core, non‐negotiable part of engineering education. 

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2. Left on their Own: Confronting Absences of AI Ethics Training among Engineering Master’s Students

   Goldenkoff, Elana; Cech, Erin A (June 2024, American Society for Engineering Education)

   Although development of Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies has been underway for decades, the acceleration of AI capabilities and rapid expansion of user access in the past few years has elicited public excitement as well as alarm. Leaders in government and academia, as well as members of the public, are recognizing the critical need for the ethical production and management of AI. As a result, society is placing immense trust in engineering undergraduate and graduate programs to train future developers of AI in their ethical and public welfare responsibilities. In this paper, we investigate whether engineering master’s students believe they receive the training they need from their educational curricula to negotiate this complex ethical landscape. The goal of the broader project is to understand how engineering students become public welfare “watchdogs”; i.e., how they learn to recognize and respond to their public welfare responsibilities. As part of this project, we conducted in-depth interviews with 62 electrical and computer engineering master’s students at a large public university about their educational experiences and understanding of engineers’ professional responsibilities, including those related specifically to AI technologies. This paper asks, (1) do engineering master’s students see potential dangers of AI related to how the technologies are developed, used, or possibly misused? (2) Do they feel equipped to handle the challenges of these technologies and respond ethically when faced with difficult situations? (3) Do they hold their engineering educators accountable for training them in ethical concerns around AI? We find that although some engineering master’s students see exciting possibilities of AI, most are deeply concerned about the ethical and public welfare issues that accompany its advancement and deployment. While some students feel equipped to handle these challenges, the majority feel unprepared to manage these complex situations in their professional work. Additionally, students reported that the ethical development and application of technologies like AI is often not included in curricula or are viewed as “soft skills” that are not as important as “technical” knowledge. Although some students we interviewed shared the sense of apathy toward these topics that they see from their engineering program, most were eager to receive more training in AI ethics. These results underscore the pressing need for engineering education programs, including graduate programs, to integrate comprehensive ethics, public responsibility, and whistleblower training within their curricula to ensure that the engineers of tomorrow are well-equipped to address the novel ethical dilemmas of AI that are likely to arise in the coming years. 

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3. Does Public Welfare Responsibility Training in Engineering Education Shape Engineering Professionals’ Reasoning about Ethical Issues?

   Cech, Erin A.; Finelli, Cynthia J.; Goldenkoff, Elana; Davis, Teanne (June 2022, American Society for Engineering Education)

   Postindustrial societies are characterized by complex technological objects and systems. The publics therein are increasingly reliant on engineers to take public welfare into account when designing and maintaining these objects and systems and raise awareness when public welfare is threatened. The training engineers receive in their engineering undergraduate education is thus expected to foster their sense of responsibility to public welfare, but such training may be absent or insufficient. In this paper, we draw on a survey of 120 employed engineers in the US to assess the extent to which they received formal public responsibility training in their undergraduate education and to assess the relationships between this training and their response to one of four randomly assigned ethical dilemmas. We find that engineers who reported receiving training in public welfare responsibilities as undergraduate students felt better prepared to address public welfare issues than those who had not received such training. Individuals with training in public welfare responsibilities were less likely to identify the ethical dilemma as irrelevant to their work, indicate that such dilemmas happen all the time, be uncomfortable reporting the issue, and believe that their colleagues might respect them less if they report. These findings have implications for improving engineering ethics education and ethical conduct trainings within engineering practice more broadly. 

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4. Social Responsibility Attitudes Among Undergraduate Computer Science Students: An Empirical Analysis

   Kreth, Quintin; Schiff, Daniel; Lee, Jeonghyun; Zegura, Ellen; Borenstein, Jason (August 2022, 2022 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition)

   Scholars and public figures have called for improved ethics and social responsibility education in computer science degree programs in order to better address consequential technological issues in society. Indeed, rising public concern about computing technologies arguably represents an existential threat to the credibility of the computing profession itself. Despite these increasing calls, relatively little is known about the ethical development and beliefs of computer science students, especially compared to other science and engineering students. Gaps in scholarly research make it difficult to effectively design and evaluate ethics education interventions in computer science. Therefore, there is a pressing need for additional empirical study regarding the development of ethical attitudes in computer science students. Influenced by the Professional Social Responsibility Development Model, this study explores personal and professional social responsibility attitudes among undergraduate computing students. Using survey results from a sample of 982 students (including 184 computing majors) who graduated from a large engineering institution between 2017 and 2021, we compare social responsibility attitudes cross-sectionally among computer science students, engineering students, other STEM students, and non-STEM students. Study findings indicate computer science students have statistically significantly lower social responsibility attitudes than their peers in other science and engineering disciplines. In light of growing ethical concerns about the computing profession, this study provides evidence about extant challenges in computing education and buttresses calls for more effective development of social responsibility in computing students. We discuss implications for undergraduate computing programs, ethics education, and opportunities for future research. 

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5. Social responsibility views in science and engineering: An exploratory study among engineering undergraduate researchers

   Fernandez, K.; Rivera-Jimenez, SM. (July 2023, American Society for Engineering Education, 2023)

   In 2017, the report Undergraduate Research Experiences for STEM Students from the National Academy of Science and Engineering and Medicine (NASEM) invited research programs to develop experiences that extend from disciplinary knowledge and skills education. This call to action asks to include social responsibility learning goals in ethical development, cultural issues in research, and the promotion of inclusive learning environments. Moreover, the Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology (ABET), the National Academy of Engineering (NAE), and the National Science Foundation (NSF) all agree that social responsibility is a significant component of an engineer’s professional formation and must be a guiding force in their education. Social Responsibility involves the ethical obligation engineers have to society and the environment, including responsible conduct research (RCR), ethical decision-making, human safety, sustainability, pro bono work, social justice, and diversity. For this work, we explored the views of Social Responsibility in engineering students that could provide insight into developing formal and informal educational activities for future summer programs. In this exploratory multi-methods study, we investigated the following research question: What views of social responsibility are important for engineering students conducting scientific in an NSF Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU)? The REU Site selected for this study was a college of engineering located at a major, public, comprehensive, land-grant research university. The Views of Social Responsibility of Scientists and Engineers (VSRoSE) was used to guide our research design. This validated instrument considers the following major social responsibility elements: 1) Consideration of societal consequences, 2) Protection of human welfare and safety, 3) Promotion of environmental sustainability, 4) Efforts to minimize risks, 5) Communication with the public, and 6) Service and Community engagement. Data collection was conducted at the end of their 10-week-long experience in Summer 2022 using Qualtrics. REU students were invited to complete an IRB-approved questionnaire, including collecting demographic data, the VSRoSE-validated survey, and open-ended questions. Open-ended questions were used to explore what experiences have influenced positive student views of social responsibility and provide rich information beyond the six elements of the VSRoSE instrument. The quantitative data from the VSRoSE is analyzed using SPSS. The qualitative data is analyzed by the research team using an inductive coding approach. In this coding process, the researchers derive codes from the data allowing the narrative or theory to emerge from the raw data itself, which is great for exploratory research. The results from this exploratory study will help to strategically initiate a formal and informal research education curriculum at the selected university. In addition, the results may serve as a way for REU administrators and faculty to create metrics of impact on their research activities regarding social responsibility. Finally, this work intends to provoke the ethics and research community to have a deeper conversation about the needs and strategies to educate this unique population of students. 

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