SIRA Modules for Effectively Engaging Engineers in Ethical Reasoning About Emerging Technologies

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This Ethics Education in Science and Engineering award addresses growing calls for ethics as a core competency in engineering education. The fundamental questions addressed by this research are:(1) What is the impact of a scaffolded, integrated, and reflexive analysis (SIRA) approach to ethical analysis of cases concerning emerging technology on the development of students' ethical reasoning and satisfaction and engagement with ethics education?(2)What characteristics of this SIRA approach most contribute to change in moral reasoning ability and to student satisfaction and engagement with engineering ethics education?This will be studied by examining the relationship between graduate and senior-level undergraduate students' participation in and experience of the online learning module and their development of ethical reasoning and satisfaction and engagement with ethics education. The result will be several SIRA modules that will have been piloted in the online format with increasingly larger groups of engineering seniors and graduate students. Their effect will be assessed through analysis of reasoning, interactivity, discourse, and reflectivity.Broader Impacts: The results of this project will be communicated in engineering education and ethics communities by presentation at professional engineering education, national engineering, and ethics conferences. This will include publishing findings in peer reviewed publications with potential to reach collegiate educators. In addition, the interactive case-based modules will be made available through the NSF-sponsored website for online ethics, Ethics CORE at http://nationalethicscenter.org, and the NAE Online Ethics Center at http://www.onlineethics.org. SIRA learning modules with established assessment instruments that have proven to be effective in developing ethical reasoning abilities for engineers will be an attractive option for embedding into a wide variety of engineering courses and curricula across disciplines and within a variety of engineering programs at both undergraduate and graduate levels.