Promoting the ethical formation of engineering students through the cultivation of their discipline-specific knowledge, sensitivity, imagination, and reasoning skills has become a goal for many engineering education programs throughout the United States. However, there is neither a consensus throughout the engineering education community regarding which strategies are most effective towards which ends, nor which ends are most important. This study provides an overview of engineering ethics interventions within the U.S. through the systematic analysis of articles that featured ethical interventions in engineering, published in select peer-reviewed journals, and published between 2000 and 2015. As a core criterion, each journal article reviewed must have provided an overview of the course as well as how the authors evaluated course-learning goals. In sum, 26 articles were analyzed with a coding scheme that included 56 binary items. The results indicate that the most common methods for integrating ethics into engineering involved exposing students to codes/standards, utilizing case studies, and discussion activities. Nearly half of the articles had students engage with ethical heuristics or philosophical ethics. Following the presentation of the results, this study describes in detail four articles to highlight less common but intriguing pedagogical methods and evaluation techniques. The findings indicate that there is limited empirical work on ethics education within engineering across the United States. Furthermore, due to the large variation in goals, approaches, and evaluation methods described across interventions, this study does not detail "best" practices for integrating ethics into engineering. The science and engineering education community should continue exploring the relative merits of different approaches to ethics education in engineering.
Background Perspective‐taking, a key component of engineering, is particularly salient in engineering ethics. Yet practices for promoting its development in engineering students both within and outside of ethics education remain largely underexplored. Purpose The objective of this investigation was twofold: first, we explored the aspects of an engineering ethics course that contributed to changes in perspective‐taking among graduate‐level engineering students. Second, we explored the nature of these changes. Design/Method We used Critical Incident Technique to explore these two research objectives. To enhance the rigor of this qualitative investigation, we implemented Walther, Sochacka, and Kellam's Quality Framework. Results The analysis of 24 critical incidents extracted from post‐course interviews resulted in five distinct but related themes representing potential causes of changes in perspective‐taking. Themes included the sharing of diverse perspectives, the challenge of ethical decision‐making, projection exercises, repetitive application of Reflexive Principlism, and experiencing cognitive dissonance. Second, we found four themes representing the nature of perspectivetaking changes, including open‐mindedness, holistic perspective‐taking, principle‐based perspective‐taking, and worldview broadening. Conclusions These findings elucidate nuances engineering educators might consider when seeking perspective‐taking development among their students, such as the nature of case study prompts and the relationship between perspective‐taking and ethical reasoning processes.
interests include developing pedagogical strategies to improve STEM students' ethical reasoning skills; exploring the role of empathy within design, innovation and sustainability; synthesizing the influence of societal and individual worldviews on decision-making; assessing STEM students' learning in the spaces of design, ethics, and sustainability; and exploring the impact of pre-engineering curriculum on students' abilities and career trajectories. The Development and Growth of Empathy among Engineering Students AbstractDiscourse on empathy is growing globally, as is its focus within the engineering community. In the context of engineering, scholars have depicted this interpersonal phenomenon as a necessary skill for effectively communicating, a core component of ethical reasoning, and a key technique for designing to meet the needs of users. However, literature regarding its development within engineering is rather limited, and the literature that does exist is disconnected. Even literature outside of engineering tends to focus on childhood development as opposed to adult development. While the developmental literature may tend to focus on earlier ages (likely because this is when an individual most rapidly develops), the endeavor of empathic growth and development need not be abandoned within post-secondary education. Rather, it indicates that we lack an understanding of the ideal means for empathic development later in one's life.Given the growing emphasis on the necessity of empathy to thrive as an engineer, engineering educators need to understand the constellation of existing tools and pedagogical techniques to foster empathy within the engineering curriculum. This synthesis piece highlights a variety of educational contexts and pedagogical techniques, each of which we posit are equally salient and mutually supportive for the development of engineering students' empathic skills, abilities, or dispositions. We draw from literature from a wide variety of fields, including counselling, psychology, moral philosophy, psychotherapy, neuropsychology, and engineering education. In sum, we describe five educational contexts and a myriad of techniques that we posit, when used effectively and spread across engineering curricula, will be effective means towards the development of empathy among engineering students.
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