As social justice issues facing our nation continue to be placed in the foreground of everyday life, it is important to understand how undergraduate civil engineering students perceive and understand relations between social justice and our infrastructure systems. Additionally, as more civil engineering undergraduate programs increase the emphasis on ethics and equity issues in their curricula, we must also seek to understand students’ awareness of their influence, as civil engineering professionals, to improve infrastructure systems that contribute to injustice and inequity. This paper presents findings from a pilot study conducted as part of an NSF-funded grant implementing cultural and curricular changes in a medium-sized civil engineering department in the southeast. Drawing on frameworks that examine how individuals critically understand systems of oppression, and the justification used to explain these systems this work examined student perceptions of inequities in societal infrastructure systems. The present study was guided by the following research questions: (1) Are undergraduate civil engineering students critically aware of inequities in society’s infrastructure systems? (2) To what degree are undergraduate civil engineering students comfortable challenging the status quo? (3) Is there an association between students’ critical awareness of inequitable infrastructure systems and their agency to promote systemic change as civil engineering professionals? Study data included survey responses to validated scales measuring: critical consciousness, system justification beliefs, social empathy, and sociopolitical control beliefs. New instrumentation was also piloted assessing equity-related perceptions and beliefs about civil engineering and infrastructure systems. Participants were junior and senior undergraduate civil engineering students (n = 21) enrolled in a professional development, community, and strategic change course, with data collected throughout the Fall 2020 semester. Results suggest that students did have awareness of infrastructure inequities and, on average, did not have strong system justification beliefs. However, there was not an association between students’ awareness of inequities and their agency beliefs about promoting systemic change as civil engineers. After presenting study results, we discuss implications of study results and propose directions for future research.
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Ethics in Artificial Intelligence Education: Preparing Students to Become Responsible Consumers and Developers of AI.
The rapid expansion of Artificial Intelligence (AI) necessitates a need for educating students to
become knowledgeable of AI and aware of its interrelated technical, social, and human
implications. The latter (ethics) is particularly important to K-12 students because they may have
been interacting with AI through everyday technology without realizing it. They may be targeted
by AI generated fake content on social media and may have been victims of algorithm bias in AI
applications of facial recognition and predictive policing. To empower students to recognize
ethics related issues of AI, this paper reports the design and implementation of a suite of ethics
activities embedded in the Developing AI Literacy (DAILy) curriculum. These activities engage
students in investigating bias of existing technologies, experimenting with ways to mitigate
potential bias, and redesigning the YouTube recommendation system in order to understand
different aspects of AI-related ethics issues. Our observations of implementing these lessons
among adolescents and exit interviews show that students were highly engaged and became
aware of potential harms and consequences of AI tools in everyday life after these ethics lessons.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2048746
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10493259
- Publisher / Repository:
- Proceedings of the 2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition.
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Proceedings of the 2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition.
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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