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

该奖项支持一项研究项目，该项目旨在开发一种新的教学方法，将学术环境中的工程伦理培训与工业环境中的工程实习相结合，以培养工程师的专业人才。该项目将促进学生培养强烈的道德敏感性和推理能力（即道德能力），并将促进建立道德能力作为与工程师身份相关的核心能力。研究小组还将开发一种工具来衡量工程师身份的拟议道德成分。现有的文献提供了很少的信息关于工程伦理的发展作为工程师身份的一个组成部分或策略来衡量它。此外，很少有相关文献以任何方式将伦理与工程师身份联系起来。本研究通过评估将职业道德教育融入学生实习对学生道德工程师身份发展的影响，直接解决了这些重大而有问题的差距。在该奖项的最后一年，研究团队将举办研讨会，培训佛罗里达理工大学和南佛罗里达大学的教师如何自己开展道德研讨会，使教学模式能够可持续发展，并促进干预措施向其他不同机构的可转移性。本项目拟解决以下两个研究问题。在何种程度上，学生先前的态度、价值观、与伦理相关的目标，以及对工程师伦理责任的认知，会随着专业工程伦理培训的参与而改变？专业工程道德的指导，加上课外实习经验，如何加强学生专业工程师身份的道德成分的发展？为了解决这些问题，研究人员将与佛罗里达理工大学的工程专业学生进行一项多方法研究，该大学有一个非常结构化的强制性实习计划，非常适合拟议的干预措施。干预措施包括加强学生实习，在实习经历之前，举办研讨会，重点关注道德案例研究的批判性分析。实习结束后，他们将使用学生论文和在线调查的定性内容分析来衡量对学生道德工程师身份的集体影响。该项目的结果将有助于工程伦理教育学，并为工程师身份研究制定额外的伦理措施。该项目将明确扩展到邻近的南佛罗里达大学的工程专业学生，南佛罗里达大学是一所更大的大都市研究型大学，没有正式的实习计划。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

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.