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

该奖项支持一个研究项目，该项目旨在开发一种新的教学方法来培养工程师，将学术环境中的工程道德培训与行业环境中的工程实习相结合。该项目将促进学生发展强大的道德敏感性和推理能力(即道德能力)，并将促进将道德能力确立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伦理部分。现有的文献很少提供关于工程伦理作为工程师身份的组成部分或衡量它的策略的发展的信息。此外，很少有相关文献以任何方式包含与工程师身份相关的伦理学。这项拟议的研究通过评估将职业道德教育整合到学生实习中对学生道德工程师身份发展的影响，直接解决了这些重大和有问题的差距。在获奖的最后一年，研究小组将领导研讨会，培训佛罗里达理工大学和南佛罗里达大学的教职员工，如何自己举办伦理研讨会，使教学模式能够持续发展，并促进干预措施转移到其他不同的机构。本项目建议解决以下两个研究问题。参与专业工程伦理培训后，学生先前存在的与伦理相关的态度、价值观和目标以及对工程师伦理责任的看法会在多大程度上发生变化？专业工程伦理的教学，加上共同课程的实习经历，如何促进学生职业工程师身份的伦理成分的发展？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学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讲习班，重点是对道德案例研究进行批判性分析。实习结束后，他们将使用学生论文的定性内容分析和在线调查来衡量集体对学生伦理工程师身份的影响。该项目的成果将有助于工程伦理教育学，并为工程师身份研究开发更多的伦理措施。该项目将明确将干预范围扩大到邻近的南佛罗里达大学的工程学学生，这是一所规模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NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势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.