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This paper begins with the premise that ethics and diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) overlap in engineering. Yet, the topics of ethics and DEI often inhabit different scholarly spaces in engineering education, thus creating a divide between these topics in engineering education research, teaching, and practice.

We investigate the research question, “How are ethics and DEI explicitly connected in peer‐reviewed literature in engineering education and closely related fields?”

We used systematic review procedures to synthesize intersections between ethics and DEI in engineering education scholarly literature. We extracted literature from engineering and engineering education databases and used thematic analysis to identify ethics/DEI connections.

We identified three primary themes (each with three sub‐themes): (1) lenses that serve to connect ethics and DEI (social, justice‐oriented, professional), (2) roots that inform how ethics and DEI connect in engineering (individual demographics, disciplinary cultures, institutional cultures); and (3) engagement strategies for promoting ethics and DEI connections in engineering (affinity toward ethics/DEI content, understanding diverse stakeholders, working in diverse teams).

There is a critical mass of engineering education scholars explicitly exploring connections between ethics and DEI in engineering. Based on this review, potential benefits of integrating ethics and DEI in engineering include cultivating a socially just world and shifting engineering culture to be more inclusive and equitable, thus accounting for the needs and values of students and faculty from diverse backgrounds.

 

Empathy is an important skill and disposition in engineering education but measuring and assessing empathy in specific engineering contexts is a novel domain of research. In this study, we iterated on a measure of empathy in engineering design. In this refined instrument, we measured and compared responses to the same set of survey items in different configurations. In the first configuration, we measured Cognitive Empathy and Affective Empathy across three design phases. In the second configuration, we retained the focus on Cognitive Empathy and Affective Empathy and variation across three design phases, but we also differentiated between self- and other- orientated empathy. An example construct in this second configuration is Imagine-Other Cognitive Empathy in Needfinding. To provide evidence of the trustworthiness of constructs, we computed Cronbach’s alpha as a measure of internal consistency reliability and identified Spearman correlations with four extant empathy constructs as a means of external validity. All constructs in the first configuration were reliable but several constructs in the second configuration were unreliable. However, many constructs in both configurations exhibited moderate to large correlations with four existing constructs. We found students exhibited significant changes in Cognitive Empathy in Needfinding, but students did not exhibit changes in affective or cognitive empathy in other design phases. However, by employing the second configuration, we found that students demonstrated significant and positive changes in Imagine-Other Cognitive Empathy in two design phases (Concept Generation and Solution Evaluation) while exhibiting no changes in Imagine-Self Cognitive Empathy. We also analyzed students’ written responses to an open-ended question pre/post-course. This analysis revealed that, after participating in this course, students: (1) situated users as the primary rationale for design work, (2) understood addressing users’ needs as critical to design work, and (3) exhibited broadened definitions about who (or what) constitutes a user. This work provides instructors with a means to assess students’ empathy with and for users in design and to more purposefully target students’ empathic development whilst accounting for engineering design phases.