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1. Faculty perspectives on frameworks of responsibility in their disciplines

   https://doi.org/10.1109/ETHICS53270.2021.9632753  

   Beever, Jonathan; Kuebler, Stephen; Pinkert, Laurie A.; Taylor, Lakelyn E. (October 2021, 2021 IEEE International Symposium on Ethics in Engineering, Science and Technology (ETHICS))

   This presentation reports on four interviews with faculty leaders across STEM disciplines at a single institution of higher education. The interviews evidence important overlap and divergence in the perceptions of the roles that disciplinary frameworks play in STEM enculturation. Further, they suggest variance in the perceived nature and scope of ethics across disciplines. The presentation argues that this divergence has implications for institutional cultures of ethics, notions of professional responsibility, and participation in team-based science. 

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2. [Full Research Paper, Ethical Engineering in Industry and Applied Contexts] Responsibility and Accountability: Faculty Leaders, Ethics Frameworks, and Disciplinary Enculturation

   https://doi.org/10.18260/1-2--42341  

   Pinkert, Laurie; Beever, Jonathan; Kuebler, Steven; Taylor, Lakelyn; Vazquez, Eve; Milanes, Victor (June 2023, ASEE Conferences)

   In this paper, we explore faculty-leader perspectives on “standards,” established statements of expected ethical behavior at disciplinary levels (see page 5), through the analysis of interviews with faculty from the engineering-adjacent disciplines of computer science and biology as an important mechanism to understand the larger ecology of STEM ethics enculturation in which engineers often find themselves. To situate these interviews, we first discuss the existing landscape of literature around faculty roles in shaping the normative values. Then, we report on a set of faculty interviews that investigate the ethics frameworks (and their underlying values) at work in their departments and programs. Specifically, this paper reports a subset of data that is part of a larger NSF-funded research project (award #2024296) exploring the interplay among individual value foundations and disciplinary ethics frameworks in engineering and STEM education. We conclude by analyzing the conceptual and practical distinctions between responsibility and accountability as they relate to the standards identified by the disciplinary faculty we interviewed. 

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3. Disciplinary Leaders Perceptions of Ethics: An Interview-Based Study of Ethics Frameworks Paper ID #37843

   Pinkert, LA; Taylor, L.; Beever, J.; Kuebler, SM; Klonoff, E. (August 2022, ASEE 2022)

   Understanding institutional leaders’ perspectives on ethics frameworks can help us better conceptualize where, how, and for whom ethics is made explicit across and within STEM related disciplines and, in turn, to better understand the ways developing professionals are enculturated toward responsibility within their disciplines. As part of an NSF-funded institutional transformation project, our research team conducted interviews with academic leaders about the frameworks of ethics in their home departments, programs, and fields. This paper reports on a series of eleven (11) interviews whose content describes the perspectives of disciplinary leaders from biology, chemistry, computer science, mathematics, mechanical and aerospace engineering, optics, philosophy, physics, psychology, STEM education, and writing and rhetoric. Contextualizing frameworks through the participants’ identification of experience, content, and audience allows us to better understand the landscape of ethics practices and procedures that act as the explicit training and education STEM learners receive in their disciplines. If ethics is an important educational focus for engineering, and the work of engineering relies on interdisciplinary connections, then understanding how ethics is taken up both within and across those collaborating disciplines is an important means of supporting ethics in engineering. 

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4. 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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5. Exploring the Perceptions of Professional Values among First-Year Engineering Students: A Cross-Cultural Comparison

   https://doi.org/10.1109/ISTAS55053.2022.10227117  

   Gammon, Andrea; Zhu, Qin; Streiner, Scott; Clancy, Rockwell; Thorpe, Ryan (November 2022, IEEE)

   In the engineering ethics education literature, there has recently been 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 perceive the structure and elements of ethics curricula, pregiven ethics scenarios, what personal ethical beliefs and specific political ideals they hold (e.g., fairness and political involvement), and institutional ethical climates. Complementary to existing studies, our project surveyed how first-year engineering students perceive professional ethical values. Specifically, we asked students to list the three most important values for defining a good engineer. This question responds to a gap in existing engineering ethics literature that engineering students’ perceptions (especially first-year students) of professional virtues and values are not sufficiently addressed. We argue that designing effective and engaged ethics education experiences needs to consider the professional values perceived by students and how these values are related to the values communicated in the engineering curriculum. This paper is part of a larger project that compares how engineering students develop moral reasoning and intuition longitudinally across three cultures/countries: the United States, Netherlands, and China. We hope that findings from this paper can be useful for engineering educators to reflect on and design subsequent ethics education programs that are more responsive to students’ perceptions of professional values when beginning an engineering program. 

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