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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. Studying the Formation of Engineers: A Case Study of a Higher-education Learning Ecology

   Korte, Russell; LeBlanc, Saniya (July 2021, ASEE Annual Conference proceedings)

   null (Ed.)

   The development of professional engineers for the workforce is one of the aims of engineering education, which benefits from the complementary efforts of engineering students, faculty, and employers. Typically, current research on engineering competencies needed for practice in the workplace is focused on the experiences and perspectives of practicing engineers. This study aimed to build on this work by including the perspectives and beliefs of engineering faculty about preparing engineering students, as well as the perspectives and beliefs of engineering students about preparing for the workplace. The overall question of the research was, “What and how do engineering students learn about working in the energy sector?” Additional questions asked practicing engineers, “What is important to learn about your work and how did you learn what was important when you started in this industry? For engineering faculty, we asked, “What is important for students to learn as they prepare for work as professionals in the energy industry?” We anticipated that the findings of triangulating these three samples would help us better understand the nature of the preparation of engineering students for work by exploring the connections and disconnections between engineering education in school and engineering practice in the workplace. The aim was to map out the complex ecosystem of professional learning in the context of engineering education and practice. The core concept framing this study is the development of competence for engineering practice—including the education of students in the context of higher education and the practical learning of newly hired engineers on the job. Initial findings of the work-in-progress describe the nature of instruction and learning in higher education, learning in the workplace, along with comparisons and contrasts between the two. As of this point, we have initially mapped the learning ecosystem in the workplace based on in-depth, qualitative interviews with 12 newly hired engineers in the target energy company. In addition, we are analyzing interviews with two managers in the company and three other experienced leaders in the energy industry (this sample is currently in process and will include interviews with more participants). Currently, we are analyzing and mapping the learning and experiences of students in their studies of energy engineering and the instructional goals of engineering faculty teaching and mentoring these students. The map of the higher education ecosystem will connect with the workplace ecosystem to portray a more longitudinal map of the learning and development of professional competence of engineering students preparing for their career in the energy sector. The findings of the analysis of the workplace emphasized the importance of the social and relational systems in the workplace, while very preliminary indications from the educational context (students and faculty) indicate initial awareness of the social context of energy practice and policy. There are also indications of the nature of important cultural differences between higher education and industry. We continue to collect data and work on the analysis of data with the aim of mapping out the larger learning and experience ecosystem that leading to professional competence. 

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3. Identifying Critical Incidents Related to Ethics Among Early-Career Engineers

   https://doi.org/10.1109/FIE58773.2023.10343226  

   Stepback, Lazlo; Zoltowski, Carla B; Claussen, Stephanie; Jesiek, Brent K; Aubeneau, Emelina (October 2023, IEEE)

   This paper uses the critical incident technique to analyze how early career engineers experience ethics in the workplace. Our results build off a previously developed framework that categorizes critical incidents related to professional engineering ethics, but we expand the framework to address its gaps. Though there was significant overlap between our findings and the existing framework in the types of critical incidents reported by participants, in some cases the severity of a negative ethical experience was not captured by existing categories, especially when describing sexual harassment in the workplace. Many incidents also required multiple categories to accurately describe them as opposed to a single overarching descriptor. Additionally, we observed a connection between personal morality and professional ethics that was present in some critical incidents. Our observations suggest that similar types of critical incidents related to ethics may often be experienced by engineers, but more work needs to be done to expand the classification of these situations and better understand how engineers develop ethics-related competencies, especially early in their careers and in a workplace context. 

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4. Identifying Critical Incidents Related to Ethics Among Early-Career Engineers

   Stepback, Lazlo; Zoltowski, Carla B; Claussen, Stephanie; Jesiek, Brent K; Aubeneau, Emelina (October 2023, 2024 IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference)

   This paper uses the critical incident technique to analyze how early career engineers experience ethics in the workplace. Our results build off a previously developed framework that categorizes critical incidents related to professional engineering ethics, but we expand the framework to address its gaps. Though there was significant overlap between our findings and the existing framework in the types of critical incidents reported by participants, in some cases the severity of a negative ethical experience was not captured by existing categories, especially when describing sexual harassment in the workplace. Many incidents also required multiple categories to accurately describe them as opposed to a single overarching descriptor. Additionally, we observed a connection between personal morality and professional ethics that was present in some critical incidents. Our observations suggest that similar types of critical incidents related to ethics may often be experienced by engineers, but more work needs to be done to expand the classification of these situations and better understand how engineers develop ethics-related competencies, especially early in their careers and in a workplace context. 

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5. Understanding the Situated Workplace Practices and Habits of Engineers Using Agile Ethnography

   Green, Theresa; Minichiello, Angela; Wilson-Lopez, Amy (August 2022, 2022 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition)

   This methods paper describes the application of and insights gained from using aspects of an emerging methodology, agile ethnography, to study engineers working in practice. Research has suggested that there is a misalignment between what is taught in engineering school and the types of work that engineers do in practice [1]. Little is known about the types of engineering work that are conducted in practice [2], [3]. In order to best prepare engineering graduates to meet the demands of the engineering workforce, students should be taught the types of knowledge and problem-solving strategies that are commonly used by practicing engineers. By teaching students the problem-solving strategies that are used by their professional counterparts, the gap between what students are taught in school and what is expected of them in the workplace may be lessened. The purpose of this paper is to describe how agile ethnography [4], [5] was successfully used in our research project to examine workplace literacy practices and habits of mind employed by eight engineers in their workplaces over a period of three years. The overarching purpose of the project was to develop models of disciplinary literacy instruction [6] and habits of mind [7] in engineering, both of which are potential methods for teaching students the knowledge, skills, and strategies that may prepare them for an engineering career. Disciplinary literacy instruction teaches students the ways that practitioners use literacy practices when reading, writing, interpreting, and evaluating discipline-specific information [8]. Habits of mind are the intelligent behaviors that guide how professionals respond when faced with situations of uncertainty [9]. By understanding how engineers use disciplinary literacy practices and habits of mind in the workplace, models for student instruction can be developed. These instructional practices can be used to support students’ use of authentic engineering practices and ways of thinking that will support them in the classroom and in their future workplaces. Findings about the disciplinary practices and habits of mind of the eight engineers are presented in previous publications by the authors (e.g., [10]–[12]). 

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