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This study aims to investigate the impact of exposure to critical narratives on students' abilities to recognize ethical dilemmas and broader impacts in engineering work. Critical narratives are place-based stories that engage students and help them enhance their critical thinking skills by making connections between the narratives, broader impacts of engineering work, and their responsibility to address these issues. The effectiveness of the critical narrative intervention was assessed by implementing a discussion-based approach around three critical narratives, which required students to listen to the narrative, respond to focus questions, engage with their peers, and reflect on the process. The intervention was completed by 58 students as part of their ethics module in a senior capstone design engineering course, while a comparison group of 60 students did not receive the intervention. Both groups completed a project-group discussion assignment where they were asked to identify and discuss ethical dilemmas and broader impacts encountered while working on their capstone design projects. Researchers developed a 5-point rubric to evaluate the responses to focus questions and reflections on the process. Results indicated that the study group that received the intervention achieved higher average scores on all three of the criteria that were evaluated, but lower scores on the reflection component. The accompanying paper will discuss the theoretical motivation, deployment of the intervention, and statistical analysis of the results.
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Personality dimensions, global and ethical perspectives and engineering students’ ethical decisions
Motivation is an important predictor of ethical awareness; however, it is not easy to assess. The goal of our study is to examine the relationship between motivation and ethical awareness in engineering students. We focus on two personality measures: person-thing orientation and spheres of control and test their association with ethical awareness using engineering scenarios that present ethical dilemmas. We predict that engineering students who score higher on the personality dimension of personthing orientation will display more ethical awareness than those who score lower. We also predict that students with a higher level of personal control will also display more ethical awareness. Two groups of students were involved in the study. Group 1 was formed by fifty-three first-year engineering students from University in the United States and Group 2 was represented by sixty-four sophomore engineering students in Engineering School in Spain. Students worked individually on case studies that presenting ethical dilemmas; they were asked to write short essays describing how they would respond to each situation. Then the essays were analyzed using an ethical reasoning and a global awareness rubric. Results revealed that 1) the context/nature of the students’ responses to the case study varied greatly, 2) personality traits and global and ethical perspective, all correlate to students’ ethical decisions as measured by their responses to the case studies scores, 3) there is an alignment between the SOC and the Global Perspective Inventory (GPI) dimensions that merits further exploration.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1737042
- PAR ID:
- 10436696
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Personality dimensions, global and ethical perspectives and engineering students’ ethical decisions
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 729 to 738
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/10.5821/conference-9788412322262.1345
