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Human-designed systems are increasingly leveraged by data-driven methods and artificial intelligence. This leads to an urgent need for responsible design and ethical use. The goal of this conceptual paper is two-fold. First, we will introduce the Framework for Design Reasoning in Data Life-cycle Ethical Management, which integrates three existing frameworks: 1) the design reasoning quadrants framework (representing engineering design research), and 2) the data life-cycle model (representing data management), and 3) the reflexive principles framework (representing ethical decision-making). The integration of three critical components of the framework (design reasoning, data reasoning, and ethical reasoning) is accomplished by centering on the conscientious negotiation of design risks and benefits. Second, we will present an example of a student design project report to demonstrate how this framework guides educators towards delineating and integrating data reasoning, ethical reasoning, and design reasoning in settings where ethical issues (e.g., AI solutions) are commonly experienced. The framework can be implemented to design courses through design review conversations that seamlessly integrate ethical reasoning into the technical and data decision-making processes. 

There have already been numerous reported computer algorithm biases that systematically discriminate against certain content, individuals, or groups and that have had serious impacts on society. This session examines an information literacy component focused on algorithm bias in the presenter’s undergraduate-level course on data management. The course meets the university’s requirements for the certificate “Applications in Data Science”. The detected cases, and perspectives of undergraduate students in regard to privacy, fairness, and ethics are shared and discussed. 

Background: Studies of changes in engineering students’ perceptions of ethics and social responsibility over time have often resulted in mixed results or shown only small longitudinal shifts. Comparisons across different studies have been difficult due to the diverse frameworks that have been used for measurement and analysis in research on engineering ethics and have revealed major gaps between the measurement tools and instruments available to assess engineering ethics and the complexity of ethical and social responsibility constructs. Purpose/Hypothesis: The purpose of this study was to understand how engineering students’ views of ethics and social responsibility change over the four years of their undergraduate degrees and to explore the use of reflexive principlism as an organizing framework for analyzing these changes. Design/Method: We used qualitative interviews of engineering students to explore multiple facets of their understanding of ethics and social responsibility. We interviewed 33 students in their first and fourth years of their undergraduate studies. We then inductively analyzed the pairs of interviews, using the reflexive principlism framework to formulate our findings. Results: We found that engineering students in their fourth year of studies were better able to engage in balancing across multiple ethical principles and specification of said ethical principles than they could as first year students. They most frequently referenced nonmaleficence and, to a lesser degree, beneficence as relevant ethical principles at both time points, and were much less likely to reference justice and autonomy. Conclusions: This work shows the potential of using reflexive principlism as an analytical framework to illuminate the nuanced ways that engineering students’ views of ethics and social responsibility change and develop over time. Our findings suggest reflexive principlism may also be useful as a pedagogical approach to better equip students to specify and balance all four principles when ethical situations arise. 

Abstract Prior research on engineering students’ understandings of ethics and social responsibility has produced mixed and sometimes conflicting results. Seeking greater clarity in this area of investigation, we conducted an exploratory, longitudinal study at four universities in the United States to better understand how engineering undergraduate students perceive ethics and social responsibility and how those perceptions change over time. Undergraduate engineering students at four U.S. universities were surveyed three times: during their 1st (Fall 2015), 5th (Fall 2017), and 8th semesters (Spring 2019). The students who completed all three surveys (n = 226) comprise the sample that was analyzed in this paper for changes in their scores on five instruments: Fundamentals of Engineering/Situational Judgment, Moral Disengagement, ABET Engineering Work and Practice Considerations, Macroethics, and Political and Social Involvement Scale. We found that students modestly increased their knowledge of ethics and ability to apply that knowledge in situations calling for them to exercise judgment. In addition, they consistently indicated that health and safety considerations in engineering were of highest importance. They also showed steady levels of social consciousness over time, in contrast to other studies which detected a culture of increasing disengagement in engineering students throughout the four years of their undergraduate studies. 

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. 

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. 

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. 

As part of National Science Foundation (NSF) sponsored Research in the Formation of Engineers (RFE), we have been focusing on inclusive teaching strategies for engineering professors. Now, in the presence of a pandemic and protests for racial justice in America, underrepresented students are facing unprecedented challenges as they navigate new situations of remote learning. This paper describes inclusive teaching strategies in the current context of isolating situations. Where possible, we point to examples of some specific virtual tools that instructors can use in their remote learning courses.