2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Assessment plays an important role in education, and there is no exception in engineering ethics education. However, although there have been efforts to evaluate students’ learning in engineering ethics classrooms, relatively limited efforts have been made to utilize valid and reliable assessment instruments to evaluate students’ achievement of learning objectives in engineering ethics education. It may be partly due to the limited number of instruments specifically designed for engineering ethics education. In this paper, we report our review of the papers that have reported the development and validation study of assessment instruments for engineering ethics interventions. We searched for papers published in representative journals and conference proceedings in the field of engineering education and engineering ethics. As a result, eight different assessment instruments specifically designed for engineering contexts have been found. We found that the majority of the papers reported an individual-level assessment instrument, which aims at measuring individual students’ qualities or characteristics. We also found a change in the trend in the subject of the assessment instrument. While the early efforts in developing assessment instruments focused mostly on assessing engineering students’ reasoning skills, more recent publications introduce assessment instruments designed for measuring students’ attitudes or qualities related to broader societal considerations, such as social responsibility and community engagement, as well as diversity and inclusion and social justice considerations. Based on the review, we briefly discuss opportunities in the new assessment instrument development effort.