Collaborative Research: Assessing Individual Ethical Reasoning and Team Ethical Climate: Understanding their Relationship in Undergraduate Design Teams

当今全球社会的工程师正在与世界上越来越多的民族和文化进行互动，这给这个行业带来了更多的社会和道德复杂性，并提高了实践工程师成为有能力的道德决策者和道德团队气候贡献者的重要性。 工程教育工作者负责帮助学生发展这些技能，以促进他们的转移到实践中。项目的最终目标是培养学生的道德推理能力，并使他们能够引导自己通过当今全球性的，以团队为基础的工程专业的复杂性。 一个障碍是难以评估这一领域的技能发展。特别是缺乏对工科学生的评估措施。 旨在评估一般道德发展的措施并不是为了解决工程中处理道德情况的特殊性。此外，由于大多数本科生学习应用伦理推理工程通过设计课程，在团队中讲授，个人道德发展和团队氛围之间的相互作用的知识，以及个人和团队因素，是至关重要的设计有效的学习环境。本项目的目标是通过以下研究填补这一空白：1）开发可靠有效地测量个人道德推理和团队道德气候的工具，2）跟踪本科生设计团队中道德推理的增长，3）调查个人道德推理和团队道德气候之间的关系，包括个人和群体因素或特征如何影响学生道德推理和团队气氛的变化。该项目的成果最终将为教师提供工具，以评估个人道德发展和团队氛围，并提供见解和经验教训，从四个不同的机构，将提供广泛的适用性的研究结果的设计经验。智力优势该项目通过提供适用于以工程为中心的多学科设计团队的有效和可靠的措施，填补了当前评估工具的空白。该项目正在努力制作经过验证的评估工具，以及对四个不同项目的个别学生和团队的分析。该项目的预期成果是适用于广泛机构的有效措施。更广泛的影响这项研究的结果对整个工程教育和其他领域都有潜在的影响。这项研究的结果将有助于确定最能支持道德推理和团队道德氛围发展的特定类型的体验，使教师和管理人员能够战略性地扩展和优化课程和计划，为更多的学生提供更高质量的体验。

Engineers in today's global society are interacting with ever more of the world's peoples and cultures which is introducing more social and ethical complexity to the profession and raising the importance of practicing engineers becoming capable ethical-decision makers and contributors to ethical team climates. Engineering educators are responsible for helping students to develop these skills in order to facilitate their transfer into practice. The ultimate project goal is to develop students' ethical reasoning skills and equip them to guide themselves through the complexities of today's global, team-based engineering profession. A barrier is the difficulty of assessing skills development in this area. In particular there is a paucity of assessment measures for engineering students. Measures designed to assess general moral development are not intended to address the peculiarities of handling ethical situations in engineering. In addition, because most undergraduates learn to apply ethical reasoning to engineering through design courses that are taught in teams, knowledge of the interaction between individual ethical development and the team climate, as well as individual and team factors, is vital to design effective learning environments. The goal of this project is to fill this gap through research by 1) developing instruments which reliably and validly measure individual ethical reasoning and team ethical climate, 2) tracking the growth of ethical reasoning in undergraduate student design teams, and 3) investigating the relationship between individual ethical reasoning and team ethical climate, including how individual and group factors or characteristics affect change in students' ethical reasoning and in team climate. The outcomes of the project will ultimately provide faculty with tools to assess individual ethical development and team climate as well as provide insights and lessons learned from design experiences at four diverse institutions that will provide broad applicability of the findings. Intellectual Merit This project is filling a void in current assessment tools by providing valid and reliable measures applicable for engineering-centered and multidisciplinary design teams. The project is working to produce validated assessment tools as well as analyses of individual students and teams across four diverse programs. The intended outcomes of this project are validated measures that are applicable to a broad range of institutions. Broader Impacts The findings of this research have potential impacts across engineering education and beyond. The results of this research will help identify the specific types of experiences that best support development of ethical reasoning and team ethical climate, allowing faculty and administrators to strategically scale and optimize curriculum and programs to provide more students with higher quality experiences.