Learning Engineering Ethics Through High-Impact Collaborative and Competitive Scenarios

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This project aims to serve the national interest by improving college engineering students' knowledge about ethics and their ability to use ethics in decision making. Across disciplines, engineering solutions often have major, long-lasting impacts on society. As a result, engineers are frequently confronted with social and ethical dilemmas in their professional lives. The project aims improve the ability of future engineers to consider social impacts and ethical issues in making decisions. Specifically the project aims to: 1) understand how first year engineering students reason through ethical dilemmas in an engineering context; 2) determine if interactive collaborative and competitive scenarios are effective for teaching engineering ethics; and 3) determine if these new approaches are more effective than traditional methods of ethics instruction. Given the significant societal impacts of engineering technical decisions, this project aims to understand and positively influence how engineering students develop these crucial skills as part of their professional development. The project will use both the Defining Issues Test 2 and the Engineering Ethical Reasoning Instrument to quantitatively assess students’ ethical reasoning in the first year of engineering programs at the University of Connecticut, Rowan University, and the University of Pittsburgh. Additionally, qualitative assessments of student ethical reasoning will be accomplished through think-aloud protocols followed by coding of the results. Three different collaboratively developed interactive scenarios for ethics education will be used in first year classes to determine the impact of these interventions on students’ ethical reasoning. These results will be compared to outcomes from traditional instructional techniques using a split cohort model. As part of this project, the project team will use previously developed instruments to assess students’ ethical reasoning and develop and test several interactive scenarios for teaching ethical reasoning in an engineering context. This project is supported by the NSF Improving Undergraduate STEM Education Program: Education and Human Resources, which supports research and development projects to improve the effectiveness of STEM education for all students. Through the Engaged Student Learning track, the program supports the creation, exploration, and implementation of promising practices and tools.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.