Engineering Students’ Varied and Changing Views of Social Responsibility

Abstract

Greg Rulifson is a Civil Engineering doctoral candidate focused on qualitative engineering education research while also completing the Engineering in Developing Communities certificate. Greg earned his bachelor's degree in Civil Engineering with a minor in Global Poverty and Practice from UC Berkeley where he developed a strong desire to use engineering to facilitate developing communities' capacity for success. and earned his master's degree in Structural Engineering and Risk Analysis from Stanford University. His dissertation will focus on how student's connections of social responsibility and engineering change throughout college as well as how engineering service is valued in employment and supported in the workplace.Dr. Angela R Bielefeldt, University of Colorado, Boulder Angela Bielefeldt is a professor at the University of Colorado Boulder in the Department of Civil, Environmental, and Architectural Engineering (CEAE). She serves as the Associate Chair for Undergraduate Education in the CEAE Department, as well as the ABET assessment coordinator. Professor Bielefeldt is the faculty director of the Sustainable By Design Residential Academic Program, a living-learning community where interdisciplinary students learn about and practice sustainability. Bielefeldt is also a licensed P.E. Professor Bielefeldt's research interests in engineering education include service-learning, sustainable engineering, social responsibility, ethics, and diversity. Engineering students have been found to have a wide range of opinions on their social responsibilities as engineers. These ideas relate to a variety of microethical and macroethical issues from safety to equality. A previous large quantitative study found that 43% of the engineering students experienced statistically significant changes in their social responsibility attitudes over 1½ years. Two research questions are being explored in this research: (i) How do engineering students change their understanding of social responsibility from the end of their first year in college to the end of their second year of college? (ii) What experiences seemed to cause these changes? To answer these research questions, a qualitative approach was used.Thirty-four students were interviewed in their second semester of college, and thirty-two of these students were interviewed again one year later. In the second round, students represented six different engineering majors (primarily civil, environmental and mechanical), seven different institutions (initially four institutions), and seven students were no longer engineering majors. Students were again asked to define SR and what influenced these changes or reinforced the same definition from the previous year. Interviews were analyzed for important themes using the code book developed for the first round of interviews while remaining open to new codes.Definitions of and influences on SR were usually more developed and detailed due to influences from a variety of factors ranging from internships and college extracurricular activitie...

Reflections on a Community-Based Service Learning Approach in a Geoinformatics Project Module

“…This idea of 'to the extent of one's abilities' aligns with the 'proportional to the opportunities and skills which one has been afforded' in the definition by Rulifson and Bielefeldt [8].…”

“…Similar to engineers, geoinformatics professionals are sometimes involved in solutions designed to solve problems of underserved populations. A social responsibility score (SR score) between 8 and 56 was calculated based on the description by Canney [5], and Rulifson and Bielefeldt [8] who designed the EPRA survey. The SR score provides an indication of a participant's degree of social responsibility; a higher SR score indicates a participant who is more aware of social responsibility.…”

“…The interview questions are presented in Table 1. The questions are adapted from Rulifson and Bielefeldt [7,8]. The sessions were voice recorded and the interviewers also took notes during the session.…”

“…They developed an integrated model to help understand the development of personal and professional social responsibility in engineers. The model has been used to evaluate engineering students' views on social responsibility [4,6,7,8]. According to Leveson and Joiner [9], historically, business education has focused on the procedural, organization-centric, geared towards the ethics of personal advantage.…”

Fourth-Year Engineering Students' Descriptions of the Importance of Improving Society Through their Engineering Careers

“…This study is a portion of a four-year longitudinal study of how engineering students' ideas about social responsibility and engineering change over their time in college [20][21][22] . Students were initially contacted through the Engineering Professional Responsibility Assessment (EPRA) 23 distributed in the Fall of 2012 and recruited using criterion-based selection 24 .…”