Collaborative Research: Foundations of Social and Ethical Responsibility Among Undergraduate Engineering Students: Comparing Across Time, Institutions, and Interventions

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Recognizing the critical roles played by technical professionals in serving the public and addressing grandchallenges, many formal courses and programs have been created to promote professional responsibilityand ethical integrity among engineering graduates. Other interventions (e.g., service learning programs)have been developed to more broadly challenge engineering and technology students to see themselves asengaged citizens and community members. Yet there has been a lack of research on foundationalunderstandings of social and ethical responsibility among such students, including how theseunderstandings change over time and through participation in specific types of learning experiences.Additional empirical evidence is needed to guide ongoing efforts to cultivate enhanced social and ethicalresponsibility among future engineers, including by identifying and promoting specific interventions thathave the biggest positive impacts on students.The proposed study responds to these gaps in the existing scholarship by asking the following researchquestions: 1) What do engineering students perceive as responsible (and irresponsible) professionalconduct, and what do they perceive as socially just (and unjust) technical practices?, and 2) How dofoundational measures and understandings of social and ethical responsibility change during a four-yearengineering degree program, both in general and in relation to specific kinds of learning experiences? Toinvestigate these questions, a longitudinal mixed-method study design will collect and analyzequantitative and qualitative data from undergraduate engineering students at four universities. To improvetransferability of results, these schools will represent a variety of institution types. Each collaboratingschool also has large numbers of students in programs of interest, e.g., service-learning and intensifiedethics instruction. Further, the study will give priority to investigating differences in perceptions andexperiences among underrepresented student populations.