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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. 

This paper describes a project to develop, deliver, and assess a short-term (one-week) course on global engineering ethics at Shandong University, Shandong, China in the summer of 2022. This project builds on previous work regarding the development and assessment of global engineering ethics, shortening the time required to deliver and assess a course. The goal was to explore whether a shorter version of the course resulted in gains similar to the longer version, and whether shorter versions of the assessment instruments could track these gains. Ethics is increasingly recognized as central to engineering, although disagreement exists concerning how it should be carried out and assessed. These disagreements are compounded by the global nature of engineering, where technologies span multiple countries, and peoples from different cultures work together as never before. Separation in time and space between those developing technologies and those affected by these technologies can increase difficulties associated with identifying and mitigating the negative effects of technology on human life. Additionally, regulatory and cultural differences can lead to disagreement regarding how technologies should or should not be developed and used. For these reasons, efforts have been made to develop global engineering ethics education. Over several years, members of the team have developed and delivered a semester-long, two-credit hour course in global engineering ethics, finding that participants scored significantly higher in measures of ethical reasoning post- than pre-course, and developed a greater concern with fairness and loyalty. Given the limited time and space in engineering curricula, and limited number of qualified faculty to teach global engineering ethics, this project sought to determine whether a course with reduced contents delivered over a shorter period of time would be similarly effective. Additionally, it sought to determine whether shorter versions of the instruments used to assess this education, the ESIT (Engineering and Science Issues Test) and MFQ (Moral Foundations Theory), would be as effective as their original, longer versions. This was motivated by the fact that, in ongoing research, the project team was having difficulty collecting adequate sample sizes, in part because it was taking so long to complete full versions of the ESIT and MFQ. To do so, in July of 2022, Chinese students enrolled in “Global Engineering Ethics” completed shortened versions of the ESIT and MFQ on the first and last days of the course. Our presentation will describe the nature of the course, as well as pre- and post-course results on shortened versions of the ESIT and MFQ. 

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. 

This Innovative Practice Full Paper presents a novel, narrative, game-based approach to introducing first-year engineering students to concepts in ethical decision making. Approximately 250 first-year engineering students at the University of Connecticut played through our adventure, titled Mars: An Ethical Expedition, by voting weekly as a class on a presented dilemma. Literature shows that case studies still dominate learning sciences research on engineering ethical education, and that novel, active learning-based techniques, such as games, are infrequently used but can have a positive impact on both student engagement and learning. In this work, we suggest that games are a form of situated (context-based) learning, where the game setting provides learners with an authentic but safe space in which to explore engineering ethical choices and their consequences. As games normalize learning through failure, they present a unique opportunity for students to explore ethical decision making in a non-judgmental, playful, and safe way.We explored the situated nature of ethical decision making through a qualitative deconstruction of the weekly scenarios that students engaged with over the course of the twelve-week narrative. To assess their ethical reasoning, students took the Engineering Ethics Reasoning Instrument (EERI), a quantitative engineering ethics reasoning survey, at the beginning and end of the semester. The EERI scenarios were deconstructed to reveal their core ethical dilemmas, and then common elements between the EERI and our Mars adventure were compared to determine how students responded to similar ethical dilemmas presented in each context.We noted that students' responses to the ethical decisions in the Mars adventure scenarios were sometimes substantially different both from their response to the EERI scenario as well as from other decisions they made within the context of the game, despite the core ethical dilemma being the same. This suggests that they make ethical decisions in some situations that differ from a presumed abstract understanding of post-conventional moral reasoning. This has implications for how ethical reasoning can be taught and scaffolded in educational settings. 

This paper describes some first-year results of a five-year project funded by the NSF’s ER2 program. The project explores how culture and education affect the ethical reasoning and moral intuitions of engineering students. This paper describes the project and is divided in two parts. First, it begins by describing some background about this project. Second, the paper presents some first-year results.