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1. Curriculum Design for a Professional Development Program to Enhance STEM Researchers’ Capacity to Identify and Address the Ethical Dimensions of Their Work

   https://doi.org/10.18260/1-2--56189  

   Clancy, Rockwell; Zhu, Qin; Lee, Lisa; Jenkins, Iris (June 2025, ASEE Conferences)

   It is emphasized in national legislation, such as the America COMPETES Act and the more recent CHIPS and Science Act, that research integrity is considered essential to the competitiveness and innovation of the U.S. economy. Various stakeholders, particularly research universities, have been developing interventions and programs to foster an ethical culture in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) research and practice among faculty and students. Dominant approaches to research ethics education have historically been shaped by biomedical ethics and the broader ethics of science, placing significant emphasis on misconduct of individual researchers, including the falsification, fabrication, and plagiarism (FFP) of research results. Although these approaches have contributed to promoting ethical conduct among individual researchers, we argue that they still face several challenges. Most notably, due to their narrow scope, traditional research ethics education approaches fail to consider the role of disciplinary cultures in shaping research ethics issues. Additionally, they do not leverage the agency of STEM researchers to identify and address these issues or to generate scalable and sustainable impacts within institutions. To address these issues, this paper introduces the IREI (Innovative Research and Ethical Impact) project, which provides an institutional transformation approach to research ethics education for faculty in STEM fields. This approach aims to transform the institutional culture for ethical STEM research by helping faculty develop and enhance their capacity to identify and address ethical issues in their daily work, while generating scalable and sustainable impacts by leveraging their social networks. More specifically, this paper introduces the curriculum design for a professional development workshop for STEM faculty, which is a key component of the IREI project. This faculty development workshop begins by broadening the understanding of ethics, shifting the focus from aligning the conduct of individual researchers with predetermined ethical principles to the impacts of their actions on the lives of others, as well as on the broader environment and society. This expanded definition is used for two main reasons. First, it emphasizes that it is the actions themselves that ultimately affect others, rather than merely a researcher’s intent or the ethical justification of their behavior. Second, it highlights that future potential impacts are as crucial in research as present, actual impacts—if not more so—since research is intrinsically novel and often future-oriented. Based on this definition, researchers are introduced to steps in the research process, from formulating questions to disseminating results. Participants are then provided with reflective tools and hands-on activities to enhance their ethical sensitivity and expertise throughout the entire research process. This enables them to identify (1) who is affected by their research at various stages and how they are impacted, and (2) strategies to maximize positive effects while minimizing any negative consequences. Finally, faculty are provided with mentoring opportunities to incorporate these reflective insights into broader impacts statements of their own research proposals and projects. Given that these statements directly pertain to their research, we hope that participants will view this workshop as both significant and relevant, as they have a natural interest in making their statements as clear and compelling as possible. 

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2. 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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3. Global Engineering Ethics at the University of Michigan-Shanghai Jiao Tong University Joint Institute (China): Research and Teaching in Cross-cultural, International Contexts

   https://doi.org/10.5840/techne2023120170  

   Clancy, Rockwell F. (January 2022, Techné: Research in Philosophy and Technology)

   Engineering is more cross-cultural and international than ever before, presenting challenges and opportunities in the way engineering ethics is conceived and delivered. To assist in providing more effective ethics education to increasingly diverse groups, this paper shares three related projects implemented at the University of Michigan-Shanghai Jiao Tong University Joint Institute (China). These projects are united in their attempts to address challenges arising from the increasingly global nature of engineering. The first is a course on global engineering ethics, developed for and attended by engineering students from diverse backgrounds. The second is a website hosting contents on global engineering ethics education and conducting research related to cross-cultural moral psychology. The third explores methods of assessing engineering ethics and moral development, using paradigms of ethical decision-making. Although these projects were developed in a Chinese-US collaboration with university students, these contexts could facilitate the adoption of similar programs elsewhere, with practicing engineers. 

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4. 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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5. Ways of Experiencing Ethics in Engineering Practice: Variation and Factors of Change

   https://doi.org/10.18260/1-2--35495  

   Zoltowski, Carla B Fila (June 2020, ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition)

   Engineering education researchers have identified a lack of alignment between the complexities of professional engineering contexts and the ways that we train and evaluate the ethical abilities and dispositions of engineers preparing for professional practice. The challenges that engineers face as practitioners are multifaceted, wicked problems situated in unique and varied disciplinary and industry contexts. Understanding the variations in ways of experiencing ethics by practicing engineers in these complex professional contexts will support a better alignment between engineering ethics instruction and what students might experience in professional practice. While there is a need for richer and more contextually-specific ethics training for many areas, our initial focus is the healthcare products industry. Thus, our NSF-funded CCE STEM project will enable us to analyze the alignment of relationships among frameworks for ethics education in engineering and the reality of engineering practice within the health products industry. As a first phase, the project has focused on understanding the different ways in which practicing engineers experience ethical issues in the health products industry using phenomenography, an empirical research methodology for investigating qualitatively different ways people experience a phenomenon. In the second phase, we have analyzed critical incidents that potentially cause the variation in experiencing ethics in practice. The findings of these studies are anticipated to serve as a guidepost for aligning educational strategies and developing effective training for future ethical practitioners. In our paper, we present an overview of the study (background and methods), progress to date, and how we expect the results to inform engineering ethics education and industry ethics training. 

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