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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. Longitudinal Qualitative Case Study of One Engineering Student’s Perceptions of Ethics and Social Responsibility: Corvin’s Story

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

   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. 

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3. Sociotechnical Undergraduate Education for the Future of Natural Resource Production

   https://doi.org/10.3390/mining3020023  

   Smith, Jessica; McClelland, Carrie; Restrepo, Oscar Jaime (June 2023, Mining)

   The greatest challenges for contemporary and future natural resource production are sociotechnical by nature, from public perceptions of mining to responsible mineral supply chains. The term sociotechnical signals that engineered systems have inherent social dimensions that require careful analysis. Sociotechnical thinking is a prerequisite for understanding and promoting social justice and sustainability through one’s professional practices. This article investigates whether and how two different projects enhanced sociotechnical learning in mining and petroleum engineering students. Assessment surveys suggest that most students ended the projects with greater appreciation for sociotechnical perspectives on the interconnection of engineering and corporate social responsibility (CSR). This suggests that undergraduate engineering education can be a generative place to prepare future professionals to see how engineering can promote social and environmental wellbeing. Comparing the different groups of students points to the power of authentic learning experiences with industry engineers and interdisciplinary teaching by faculty. 

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4. Understanding the Potential of a Holistic Engineering Project Experience in the Advancement of the Professional Formation of Engineers

   Dey, K.; Rahman, M.T.; Pyrialakou, V. D.; Martinelli, D.; Fraustino, J. D.; Deskins, J; Roy, A. R; Rambo-Hernandez, K. (July 2021, 2021 ASEE Virtual Annual Conference & Exposition)

   null (Ed.)

   The role of modern engineers as problem-definer often require collaborating with cross-disciplinary teams of professionals to understand and effectively integrate the role of other disciplines and accelerate innovation. To prepare future engineers for this emerging role, undergraduate engineering students should engage in collaborative and interdisciplinary activities with faculties and students from various disciplines (e.g., engineering and social science). Such cross-disciplinary experiences of undergraduate engineering students are not common in today’s university curriculum. Through a project funded by the division of Engineering Education and Centers (EEC) of the National Science Foundation (NSF), a research team of the West Virginia University developed and offered a Holistic Engineering Project Experience (HEPE) to the engineering students. Holistic engineering is an approach catering to the overall engineering profession, instead of focusing on any distinctive engineering discipline such as electrical, civil, chemical, or mechanical engineering. Holistic Engineering is based upon the fact that the traditional engineering courses do not offer sufficient non-technical skills to the engineering students to work effectively in cross-disciplinary social problems (e.g., development of transportation systems and services). The Holistic Engineering approach enables engineering students to learn non-engineering skills (e.g., strategic communication skills) beyond engineering math and sciences, which play a critical role in solving complex 21st-century engineering problems. The research team offered the HEPE course in Spring 2020 semester, where engineering students collaborated with social science students (i.e., students from economics and strategic communication disciplines) to solve a contemporary, complex, open-ended transportation engineering problem with social consequences. Social science students also received the opportunity to develop a better understanding of technical aspects in science and engineering. The open ended problem presented to the students was to “Restore and Improve Urban Infrastructure” in connection to the future deployment of connected and autonomous vehicles, which is identified as a grand challenge by the National Academy of Engineers (NAE) [1]. 

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5. The Development of a Student Survey on Macroethics in Aerospace Engineering [Work-In-Progress]

   Bowen, Corin L; Strehl, Elizabeth A; Ennis, M; Benham, A; Johnson, Aaron W (June 2024, American Society for Engineering Education)

   This work-in-progress paper presents the development of a survey designed to understand undergraduate aerospace engineering students’ views on macroethics in the field. Macroethics describes the real world ethical implications of engineering technology and the collective social responsibility of the aerospace engineering profession. As macroethics education is currently lacking in most undergraduate aerospace curricula in the United States, we are developing a survey intended to measure students’ current perceptions, knowledge, and beliefs about macroethics in the field. Insight into our students’ current beliefs and perceptions is imperative to develop new curricula and more generally alter the culture and direction of the aerospace engineering field from striving for apoliticalization to embracing the sociotechnical. A mixed-methods survey was taken by 158 undergraduate aerospace engineering students at two large, research-intensive universities in the United States. This paper presents confirmatory and exploratory factor analyses of Likert-scale data to further the development of the survey. The survey items were initially designed to address two proposed research questions: RQ1) To what degree are students aware of the importance of macroethical issues in the field of aerospace engineering?, RQ2) Do aerospace engineering students feel that their undergraduate education is preparing them to address macroethical issues? While confirmatory factor analysis does not confirm these two survey constructs for which the survey items were designed, an exploratory factor analysis results in five factors, each highlighting a different aspect of students’ perceptions of macroethical aerospace engineering education: 1) The criticality of the relationship between aerospace engineering and society, 2) The ease or difficulty of being an ethical aerospace engineer, 3) Technical determinism and aerospace career pathways, 4) Macroethics discussions within aerospace coursework, and 5) The ability of faculty to facilitate conversations on the macroethics of aerospace. These five factors provide a new basis upon which we will generate additional survey items in the future. Through this process, we will develop a survey that can effectively measure students’ beliefs and experiences in regards to the macroethical implications of the field of aerospace engineering. 

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