Teaching Engineering Ethics: A Case Study Approach

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Undergraduate engineering curricula in the U.S. require issues of engineering ethics to be addressed. Engineers and the engineering profession recognize that students need to learn how to use and assess available information in making ethical decisions, and how to test and develop their own perspectives on professional ethics. They need to develop the thought processes necessary to integrate information with acceptable professional "norms" of behavior, to make ethical decisions. Yet, surveys demonstrate little in the way of formal or systematic approaches to the development and testing of new curricula or teaching methods. This project will develop and test annotated case studies, with accompanying commentaries and bibliographies, in print and software form, for classroom use. Special effort will be made to develop multiphased cases, sensitive to organizational contexts and to the importance of thinking through the likely outcomes of initial decisions for later decisions that also call for ethical reflection. Workshops for engineering faculty at WMU will help them develop effective ways of meeting the ethics requirement of the Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology. Project results will be available for national dissemination. This project addresses an important issue in a unique way. The research team and collaborators are interdisciplinary and well qualified to collaborate. Further effort is likely to continue beyond the duration of this award. The project is designed well; appropriate testing and dissemination are planned. University support is good. An award in the amount of $124,977 is therefore recommended.