2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

This paper presents the progress made in the first year of a five-year NSF ER2 (Ethical and Responsible Research)-funded project on ethical and responsible research and practices in science and engineering undertaken at a large public university in the southwestern United States. The objective of this research is to improve instructor training, interventions, and student outcomes in high schools and universities to improve awareness and commitment to ethical practices in STEM coursework. The paper will describe the progress made in several components of the grant: i) Preliminary analysis of measures of ethical knowledge, reasoning skills, attitudes, and practices of several hundred undergraduate freshmen and seniors, correlated with demographic data, based on data captured in the first year of the grant; ii) Progress made in the development of the concept of “ethical self-efficacy” and an instrument to measure it for freshmen and senior engineering students, and in assessing how it relates to ethical competency and student background; iii) Implications of these analyses in the construction of a three-week professional development program that guides high school STEM teachers through the development of learning modules on ethical issues related to their courses; iv) The assessment of the undergraduate engineering curriculum in two majors to determine appropriate courses for ethics interventions to help students understand how technical activities fit within broader social, economic, and environmental contexts; the construction of these interventions; and the development of measures to track their success; and, v) Initial steps toward measuring impact of other experiences (e.g., undergraduate research, internships, service learning) and courses (e.g., humanities, social science, and business courses) on development of ethical practices, on assessments taken in senior engineering capstone courses.