An official website of the United States government
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.
more »
« less
Does Public Welfare Responsibility Training in Engineering Education Shape Engineering Professionals’ Reasoning about Ethical Issues?
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.
more »
« less
- Award ID(s):
- 2053046
- PAR ID:
- 10404578
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- American Society for Engineering Education
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
More Like this
-
-
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.more » « less
-
This WIP paper intends to supplement our current understanding of political awareness and ethical disengagement among engineering undergraduates. As an integral part of the production of globally-sold technology and weaponry [1-6], engineers in the United States need to have an active and informed interest for global public welfare as well as the political applications of their work [7]. Part of developing this informed interest is supposed to occur as they get their bachelor’s degree, as ABET expects graduates to be able to “recognize ethical and professional responsibilities in engineering situations” (Criterion 3: Student Outcomes) and make decisions that give weight to the global and societal impact of their work [8]. In spite of this effort, some engineering students shoo this responsibility, recognizing that unethical situations and practices exist in industry but choosing to write them off as a necessary or justifiable part of the field [9]. What’s more, the importance engineering students place on public welfare in general is seen to decline as they progress through their undergraduate education [10]. This study seeks to build off of these latter two findings in an attempt to further improve the characterization of ethical and political disengagement among engineering students. Through a longitudinal mixed-methods survey given to engineering students at multiple California State University (CSU) campuses, which serve primarily working class students and Students of Color, this study will quantitatively chart how student perspectives on public welfare change over the course of their undergraduate degrees–and how those responses compare to existing data from universities primarily serving wealthy and white students. This study’s survey will also employ qualitative items to gauge student perceptions on the presence of military contractor companies on their campus, particularly with respect to how this presence influences their education and goals.more » « less
-
null (Ed.)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 the 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.more » « less
-
This is a full Innovative Practice paper. Engineering professionals are increasingly called on to serve as “public welfare watchdogs” by paying heed to ways in which complex technologies can impact society and intervening when ethical issues arise. Though it is a goal of engineering education to train engineers to recognize and understand their responsibilities to the safety, health, and welfare of the public, research suggests that students are inadequately prepared to address such issues in practice. To address this concern, we designed and piloted a course module for electrical engineering master’s students to help them better address their public welfare responsibilities. In this paper, we provide a detailed description of the course module, including reflection prompts, in-class presentations, breakout group activities, discussion prompts, and post-class assignments. We also present results from our pilot, including a summary of student responses to the reflection and discussion prompts and an overview of students’ course feedback.more » « less
- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
-
Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- The DOI is not currently available.
