A Systematic Literature Review of US Engineering Ethics Interventions

Abstract

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.

A Pilot Study to Incorporate Collaboration and Energy Competency into an Engineering Ethics Course

“…To promote the professional development of engineers, experts in the United States [24] and globally [25,26] have pointed out the importance of moral education. To ensure that ethics is a core component of accredited engineering courses, in 2000, the American Board of Accreditation for Engineering and Technology (ABET) stated that college graduates should "understand professional and ethical responsibilities."…”

Enhancing engineering students' ethical reasoning: Situating reflexive principlism within the SIRA framework

“…Ethics continues to be required in the accreditation of engineering programs (ABET, n.d.). Yet, how ethics is integrated into the engineering curriculum continues to be widely varied in terms of goals, pedagogical strategies, and methods of evaluation (Haws, ; Hess & Fore, ). This study investigated reflexive principlism, an ethical reasoning approach developed specifically for preparing engineering students to analyze ethical issues (Beever and Brightman ).…”

Attitude towards Engineering Ethical Issues: A Comparative Study between Malaysian and Indonesian Engineering Undergraduates

“…Educators have come with many innovations that could improve the instructions of engineering ethics education in many higher education institutions around the globe. Hess and Fore (2018)…”