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1. Towards a Psychologically Realist, Culturally Responsive Approach to Engineering Ethics in Global Contexts

   https://doi.org/10.1007/s11948-025-00536-1  

   Clancy, Rockwell F; Zhu, Qin; Streiner, Scott; Gammon, Andrea; Thorpe, Ryan (April 2025, Science and Engineering Ethics)

   This paper describes the motivations and some directions for bringing insights and methods from moral and cultural psychology to bear on how engineering ethics is conceived, taught, and assessed. Therefore, the audience for this paper is not only engineering ethics educators and researchers but also administrators and organizations concerned with ethical behaviors. Engineering ethics has typically been conceived and taught as a branch of professional and applied ethics with pedagogical aims, where students and practitioners learn about professional codes and/or Western ethical theories and then apply these resources to address issues presented in case studies about engineering and/or technology. As a result, accreditation and professional bodies have generally adopted ethical reasoning skills and/or moral knowledge as learning outcomes. However, this paper argues that such frameworks are psychologically “irrealist” and culturally biased: it is not clear that ethical judgments or behaviors are primarily the result of applying principles, or that ethical concerns captured in professional codes or Western ethical theories do or should reflect the engineering ethical concerns of global populations. Individuals from Western educated industrialized rich democratic cultures are outliers on various psychological and social constructs, including self-concepts, thought styles, and ethical concerns. However, engineering is more cross cultural and international than ever before, with engineers and technologies spanning multiple cultures and countries. For instance, different national regulations and cultural values can come into conflict while performing engineering work. Additionally, ethical judgments may also result from intuitions, closer to emotions than reflective thought, and behaviors can be affected by unconscious, social, and environmental factors. To address these issues, this paper surveys work in engineering ethics education and assessment to date, shortcomings within these approaches, and how insights and methods from moral and cultural psychology could be used to improve engineering ethics education and assessment, making them more culturally responsive and psychologically realist at the same time. 

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2. Exploring the Ethical Perceptions of First Year Engineering Students: Public Welfare Beliefs, Ethical Behavior, and Professional Values

   Zhu, Qin; Angeli, Anna (April 2022, ASEE Zone IV Conference)

   In the engineering ethics education literature, there has recently been an 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 perceived the structure and elements of ethics curricula, personal ethical beliefs, pregiven ethics scenarios, institutional ethical climates, and particular political ideals (e.g., fairness and political involvement). Complementary to the existing studies, our project surveyed how first-year engineering students perceived public welfare beliefs, examples of (un-)ethical behaviors in engineering, and professional ethical values. Specifically, we adopted part of the well-known instrument developed by Erin Cech to assess how students perceived public welfare beliefs. An important goal of replicating Cech’s work is to examine whether students from a different cohort (i.e., 18 years after the cohort in Cech’s study, and from a more specialized institution than those in Cech’s study) hold different public welfare beliefs. We invite engineering educators to carefully examine how temporality might matter when considering the connections between previously conducted studies with their own ongoing projects. Our survey also asked students to provide an example of unethical behavior in engineering and possible ethical problems they anticipate in their future careers. Finally, we asked students to list three most important values for defining a good engineer. Such a question on professional ethical values responds to a gap in the engineering ethics literature, namely, that engineering students’ perceptions of professional virtues and values are not sufficiently addressed (especially among first-year students). This paper is part of a larger project that compares how students develop moral reasoning and intuition longitudinally across three cultures/countries: the United States, Netherlands, and China. We hope that findings in this paper can be useful for engineering educators to reflect on and design subsequent ethics education programs that are more responsive to students’ backgrounds and needs when they start their first year in engineering programs. 

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3. Talk (Engineering) Ethics to Me: Student Group Discussions about Ethical Scenarios.

   Cimino, R.; Pascal, J.; Chadha, A.; Girgis, K.; Khan, A.; Ortiz, M. (August 2022, ASEE Annual Conference proceedings)

   The past twenty years have seen the blossoming of ethics education in undergraduate engineering programs, largely as a response to the large-scale and high-impact engineering disasters that have occurred since the turn of the century. The functional form of this education differs significantly among institutions, and in recent years active learning that demonstrates a strong impact on students’ retention and synthesis of new material have taken hold as the preferred educational methodology. Among active learning strategies, gamified or playful learning has grown in popularity, with substantial evidence indicating that games can increase student participation and social interaction with their classmates and with the subject matter. A key goal of engineering ethics education is for students to learn how to identify, frame, and resolve ethical dilemmas. These dilemmas occur naturally in social situations, in which an individual must reconcile opposing priorities and viewpoints. Thus, it seems natural that as a part of their ethics education, students should discuss contextualized engineering ethical situations with their peers. How these discussions play out, and the manner in which students (particularly first-year engineering students) address and resolve ethical dilemmas in a group setting is the main topic of this research paper. In this study, first-year engineering students from three universities across the northeastern USA participated in group discussions involving engineering ethical scenarios derived from the Engineering Ethics Reasoning Instrument (EERI) and Toxic Workplaces: A Cooperative Ethics Card Game (a game developed by the researchers). Questions were posed to the student groups, which center upon concepts such as integrity, conflicting obligations, and the contextual nature of ethical decision making. An a priori coding schema based on these concepts was applied to analyze the student responses, based upon earlier iterations of this procedure performed in previous years of the study. The primary results from this research will aim to provide some insight about first-year engineering students' mindsets when identifying, framing, and resolving ethical dilemmas. This information can inform ethics education design and development strategies. Furthermore, the experimental procedure is also designed to provide a curated series of ethical engineering scenarios with accompanying discussion questions that could be adopted in any first-year classroom for instructional and evaluative purposes. 

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4. Global Engineering Ethics: What? Why? How? and When?

   Clancy, R.; Zhu, Q. (December 2022, Journal of international engineering education)

   Even though engineering programs, accreditation bodies, and multinational corporations have become increasingly interested in introducing global dimensions into professional engineering practice, little work in the existing literature provides an overview of questions fundamental to global engineering ethics, such as what global engineering ethics is, why it should be taught, how it should be taught, and when it should be introduced. This paper describes the what, why, how, and when of global engineering ethics – a form adopted from a 1996 article by Charles Harris, Michael Davis, Michael Pritchard, and Michael Rabins, which has influenced the development of engineering ethics for over twenty-five years. First, this paper describes global engineering ethics as a response to the increasingly cross-cultural, international characteristics of contemporary engineering, as well as four fundamental approaches to conceive and deliver this training (what). Next, it explains the motivations for global engineering ethics: Neither educators nor practitioners can necessarily assume a shared nationality or culture among students or between coworkers (why). Third, this paper discusses how global engineering ethics should be taught: One of the most prevalent approaches uses case studies with a cross-cultural and/or international dimension (how). Finally, it identifies spots within curricula for global engineering ethics: standalone courses, integrated modules, micro-insertions, competence-based training scenarios, and extracurricular activities (when). As the world becomes ever more cross-cultural and international, training in global ethics will be essential for both students and practicing engineers. 

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5. Comparing engineering ethics education across institutions using case study: Methodological and conceptual problems [Work in Progress]

   Clancy, Rockwell; Zhu, Qin; Streiner, Scott; Thorpe, Ryan (January 2023, 2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition)

   Ethics has long been recognized as crucial to responsible engineering, but the increasingly globalized environments present challenges to effective engineering ethics training. This paper is part of a larger research project that aims to examine the effects of culture and education on ethics training in undergraduate engineering students at universities in the United States, China, and the Netherlands. We are interested in how students’ curricular and extra-curricular (e.g., internships, service projects) experiences and training impact their ethical reasoning and moral dispositions, and how this differs cross-culturally. To understand this, we are conducting mixed methods research longitudinally over four years to engineering students at our participating universities to gauge their moral dispositions and ethical reasoning skills and to measure any change in these. This work-in-progress paper, however, is not about the direct outcomes of this research project. Rather, it critically examines our own practices and methods in doing this research. We begin the paper by briefly introducing the larger research project and motivating the use of comparative, multi-institutional case studies as necessary for contextualizing, complementing, and interpreting quantitative data on ethical reasoning and moral dispositions. Because the conditions related to engineering ethics education differ widely per participating institution for institutional (and also likely cultural) reasons, interpreting and analyzing quantitative survey data will require understanding contextual conditions of education at each institution. Comparative case studies can supply missing contextual information to provide a more complete picture of the engineering ethics educational contexts, strategies, and practices at each of the participating universities. However, in considering how to design and conduct these case studies, we realized we were operating under certain assumptions such as ethics in engineering as separate (and separable from) the “real,” or technical engineering curriculum. These assumptions have been widely problematized in engineering ethics education (Cech, 2014; Tormey et al. 2015; Polmear et al. 2019); they are assumptions that we in our teaching and research attempt to dispel. Our paper considers (and invites discussion on) the broader implications of methodological design in conducting cross-cultural multi-sited case studies in engineering ethics education research. It explores models for designing and conducting our case studies so as not to reproduce pernicious ideas about social and ethical issues in engineering as subsidiary “interventions” in the “actual,” (i.e., technical) curriculum. More generally we discuss how engineering ethics education research methods can be harnessed to overcome this established division. 

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