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更多的民族和文化互动，这给这一职业带来了更多的社会和伦理复杂性，并提高了执业工程师成为有能力的伦理决策者和伦理团队氛围贡献者的重要性。工程教育者有责任帮助学生发展这些技能，以促进他们转化为实践。该项目的最终目标是发展学生的伦理推理能力，并装备他们在当今全球化的、以团队为基础的工程职业的复杂性中引导自己。一个障碍是很难评估这一领域的技能发展。尤其是缺乏针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处理工程中道德状况的特殊性。此外，由于大多数本科生通过团队授课的设计课程学习将伦理推理应用于工程学，因此了解个人伦理发展与团队氛围之间的相互作用，以及个人和团队因素，对于设计有效的学习环境至关重要。本项目的目标是通过以下研究来填补这一空白：1)开发可靠和有效地测量个人伦理推理和团队伦理氛围的工具；2)跟踪本科生设计团队中伦理推理的发展；3)调查个人伦理推理和团队伦理氛围之间的关系，包括个人和群体因素或特征如何影响学生伦理推理和团队氛围的变化。该项目的结果最终将为教师提供评估个人道德发展和团队氛围的工具，并提供从四个不同机构的设计经验中吸取的见解和教训，从而为研究结果提供广泛的适用性。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方法，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经过验证的措施。更广泛的影响这项研究的发现对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伦理推理和团队伦理氛围发展的特定类型的体验，使教职员工和管理人员能够战略性地扩展和优化课程和计划，为更多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.