Collaborative Research: Standard: Enhancing Internships with Professional Ethics Training: Cultivating an Ethical Engineer Identity

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This award supports a research project to develop a novel pedagogical approach to the professional formation of engineers that merges engineering ethics training in an academic setting with engineering internships in an industry setting. The project will promote the development of strong ethical sensitivity and reasoning skills within students (i.e. ethical competence), and it will promote the establishment of ethical competence as a core competence associated with the engineer identity. The research team will also develop an instrument to measure the proposed ethical component of the engineer identity. The extant literature provides little information regarding the development of engineering ethics as a component of the engineer identity or strategies to measure it. In addition, very little of the related literature incorporates ethics in relation to engineer identity in any way. The proposed research directly addresses these significant and problematic gaps by assessing the effects of integrating professional ethics education into student internships on students' development of an ethical engineer identity. During the last year of the award, the research team will lead workshops to train faculty at both the Florida Polytechnic University and the University of South Florida, on how to conduct the ethics workshops themselves, enabling the sustainability of the pedagogical model and promoting transferability of the intervention to other diverse institutions.This project proposes to address the following pair of research questions. To what extent do students' pre-existing attitudes, values, and goals related to ethics and perceptions of the ethical responsibility of engineers change with involvement in professional engineering ethics training? How might instruction in professional engineering ethics, coupled with a co-curricular internship experience, enhance development of the ethical component of a student's professional engineer identity? To address these questions, the researchers will engage in a multi-method study with engineering students at the Florida Polytechnic University, which has a very structured, compulsory internship program ideally suited for the proposed intervention. The intervention involves enhanced student internships, with workshops focused on critical analyses of ethical case studies immediately prior to the internship experience. Post internship, they will measure the collective impact on students' ethical engineer identity using qualitative content analysis of student essays and online surveys. The results of this project will contribute to engineering ethics pedagogy and develops additional ethics measures for engineer identity research. The project will explicitly expand the intervention to engineering students at neighboring University of South Florida, a much larger metropolitan research-oriented university without a formal internship program.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.