Standard: Student Learning Regarding Personal, Social and Professional Responsibility

Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy NY

Investigators

Abstract

This project seeks to provide insights contributing to the cultivation of ethical educational cultures in engineering. It investigates engineering students' educational experiences, both formal and informal, to provide a holistic understanding of how students' varied experiences influence the nature and degree of their ethical engagement. The project asks: What configuration of experiences do engineering students identify as conducive to or contradicting the development, support, and enforcement of an ethical culture within the context of their education and beyond? To answer that question, the investigation focuses on how students make meaning surrounding questions of ethics spanning the domains of personal, professional, and social responsibilities. While many instructors of engineering students are committed to teaching ethics, and while many scholars of engineering education have studied which modalities of ethics education result in the greatest learning, there has been little research into how students interpret ethics - in terms of either abstract knowledge or actual practices and behaviors - or how formal and informal educational dimensions come together to provide an integrated experience for students. The findings of this research will aid engineering educators and educational policy makers implement interventions that positively impact students' overall educational experience, potentially leading both to more ethical practices and to a higher level of student engagement. Together, these outcomes could transform the career preparation of engineers and prepare engineering students better for the ethical complexities of contemporary professional engineering work. The primary research goals of the project are threefold: 1) To track diverse students' evolving understandings of the roles and places of ethics within their overall educational experience; 2) To identify the salient dimensions and primary mechanisms of their educational experience that shape these understandings; and 3) To characterize the overall educational cultural landscape at one institution by highlighting the range of students' experiences as they attempt to align their individual identities with input from their social networks, input from their instructors and advisors, and institutional educational structures. The project will use a mixed-methods approach blending qualitative analysis of data gathered through interviews, focus groups, and direct observation with quantitative analysis of data gathered via extensive student surveys. The qualitative analysis will orient the project by identifying patterns of cultural practice and meaning making based on students' own conceptions, using their own language, and relating different dimensions of ethical values and practices according to their own conceptual schemas. Findings from the analysis of qualitative data will be used to design survey instruments that probe the student body broadly on the variables of most significance. Data gathering will be focused on one cohort of students as they move through the entire educational cycle, with limited supplementary data gathered on cohorts above and/or below the targeted group. The work is poised to contribute to the literature on engineering ethics education by drawing together three broad domains of related scholarship: 1) Work on ethics instruction combining micro and macro-ethical approaches; 2) Work on engineering epistemologies and their role in shaping educational cultures; and 3) Deep ethnographies of engineering practices, including in educational contexts.