CCE STEM Standard: Understanding and Evaluating Ethical Engineering Practice

Purdue University, West Lafayette IN

Investigators

Abstract

This project will investigate the variation in ways engineers experience and understand engineering ethics within research and practice activities in the health products industry. The project will facilitate the alignment between ethics education with the needs of engineers in industry practice. The goal of this research is to explore the variation in ways engineers understand ethics within real-world practice. The research team will interview practicing engineers and student engineering interns then analyze and compare their understanding of ethics with the current strategies for teaching ethics to engineers and determine the gaps and strengths within the health products industry. The findings of this project will help educators, engineers, policy makers and administrators to evaluate current methods for teaching ethics to engineers and to determine which strategies will best prepare engineers to respond to ethical issues effectively. In this 3-year project, the research team will systematically investigate the range and complexity of ways that engineers experience ethics in the cultural and institutional contexts of everyday engineering research and practice in the health products industry. The team will apply phenomenography, a qualitative research approach, to explore and categorize the variation in ways engineers experience and understand engineering ethics within research and practice activities in the health products industry. The data will be analyzed and developed into an ?outcome space? describing a comprehensive understanding of ethical engineering practice. From this, factors that are efficacious in the formation of ethical engineering practice will be identified. The study will develop and validate current frameworks in ethics education and to determine which pedagogical and assessment strategies will cultivate comprehensive levels of ethical engineering research and practice, particularly within the context of the health products industry.