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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. 

Research in engineering ethics has assessed the ethical reasoning of students mostly in the US. However, it is not clear that ethical judgements are primarily the result of reasoning or that conclusions based on US samples would be true of global populations. China now graduates and employs more STEM majors than any other country, but the moral cognition and ethics education of Chinese engineers remain understudied. To address this gap, a study examined the relations between ethical reasoning, intuitions and education among engineering students in China. It found that (1) ethical reasoning is positively related to an emphasis on care and fairness and (2) global ethics education results in significantly higher levels of ethical reasoning, as well as a greater concern with fairness and loyalty. The relation between ethical reasoning and intuitions in China is like that of students in the US, but ethics education affects students in China differently. 

This chapter begins by discussing two broad criticisms of engineering ethics education (EEE) assessment and then suggests ways to improve it. The criticisms focus on whether (1) measures used in EEE effectively assess behavior change and (2) they should be used across different national and cultural groups. To address these criticisms, the authors argue that educators and researchers should draw on insights and methods from moral and cultural psychology, using more globally representative participant samples. Measures of EEE assessment have been developed primarily by scholars working in the United States, with participants from US universities. However, it is unclear whether moral reasoning, sensitivity, attitudes, or values result in more ethical behaviors – presumably, the goal of EEE – or if these measures assess what they should. It also remains unclear whether these measures are reliable across global populations. Engineering is a global profession, but measures of EEE have been developed by researchers in and with sample groups primarily drawn from the United States. The United States is culturally WEIRD (Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic), and relative to global populations, individuals from WEIRD cultures are outliers on various psychological and social measures. This chapter provides food for thought about behavior and culture related to ethics. 

There is consensus that the integration of ethics into STEM curricula is critical for cultivating cultures for ethical practices in STEM research. We argue that the establishment of the Ethics and Responsible Research (ER2) program, previously known as Cultivating Cultures for Ethical STEM (CCE-STEM), at NSF was driven by a cultural perspective on ethics education. According to the most recent version of its solicitation, A comprehensive approach to ethical STEM not only influences individual behavior, but it also maintains and fosters an ethical, equitable and just culture within an organization or research field. Thus, investigators submitting to the program are encouraged to examine organizational and cultural factors that influence ethical and responsible research practice (NSF, 2023). Such a cultural approach to STEM ethics education is primarily essentially holistic and pragmatic. It adopts a holistic approach by recognizing that ethics education occurs within a cultural context, and that an individual's ethical conduct can be both influenced and constrained by their research or workplace contexts. Additionally, it adopts a pragmatic perspective by viewing the objective of ethics education not merely as influencing individual ethical reasoning (as is commonly anticipated in most STEM ethics initiatives) but as an endeavor to engender more systematic, institutional-level transformations in the ethical climate in which individual scientists and engineers work. Moreover, the cultivation of an ethical research/workplace culture is considered imperative for fostering sustainable ethical transformation at both the individual and organizational levels within the campus community. Based on our initial search, while there have been seven institutional transformation projects funded through NSF's CCE STEM or ER2 program, there has been a scarcity of research that systematically compares these funded projects and seeks to derive broader theoretical insights regarding the institutional transformation approach to STEM ethics education. The purpose of this paper is to offer initial insights into the lessons that can be drawn from these funded projects, with the aim of contributing to the theoretical understanding of the institutional transformation approach to STEM ethics education. In particular, this paper seeks to investigate the following research questions: (1) What motivates researchers to opt for an institutional approach over an individualistic one? (2) What theoretical frameworks do researchers employ to tackle institutional transformation? Finally, this paper will outline how our recently awarded institutional transformation grant can benefit from these results. We intend to gather data using three major methods: (1) public summaries of these projects published on NSF’s website; (2) publications listed on each project’s dedicated webpage on NSF’s website as well as additional searches in Google Scholar; and (3) news articles and related commentaries available on the internet pertaining to these projects. We anticipate that the initial findings of this study can offer valuable insights for engineering education researchers, higher education administrators, and policymakers. These insights can aid in the development and implementation of more efficient models for fostering institutional transformation of ethical STEM cultures within and beyond their campuses. 

Ethics is crucial to engineering, although disagreement exists concerning the form engineering ethics education should take. In part, this results from disagreements about the goal of this education, which inhibit the development of and progress in cohesive research agendas and practices. In this regard, engineering ethics faces challenges like other professional ethics. To address these issues, this paper argues that the ultimate goal of engineering ethics education should be more long-term ethical behaviors, but that engineering ethics must more fully engage with the fields of empirical moral and cultural psychology to do so. It begins by considering reasons for adopting ethical behaviors as the ultimate goal of ethics education, and moves on to discuss why ethical behaviors have not been adopted as the goal of ethics education. The paper ends by considering responses to these problems, why ethical behaviors should still be adopted as the ultimate goal of ethics education.