2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Ethics has long been recognized as crucial to responsible engineering, but the increasingly global environments of contemporary engineering present new challenges to effective engineering ethics training. With the support from the National Science Foundation (NSF) Ethical and Responsible Research (ER2) program, a collaboration of investigators from Virginia Tech, University of Pittsburgh, Delft University of Technology, and Shanghai Jiao Tong University are conducting a mixed-methods project examining the effects of culture and educational experiences on ethics training in undergraduate engineering students. To gauge students’ ethical reasoning skills and moral dispositions and to measure any change in these, we administer the Engineering & Science Issues Test (ESIT) and the Moral Foundations Questionnaire (MFQ) to engineering students longitudinally over four years. Additionally, we survey students perceived public welfare beliefs (based on the work of Erin Cech on moral disengagement), examples of (un-)ethical behaviors in engineering, and personal ethical values. Now in its second year, we have conducted our initial baseline study on first-year engineering students’ ethical perceptions across three cultures (United States, Netherlands, and China), three languages, and seven institutions.

Because the conditions related to engineering ethics education differ widely per participating in institution, interpreting and analyzing survey quantitative data will require understanding the contextual conditions of education at each institution. To this end, we are employing a university-level, multi-case study design to map the landscape of engineering ethics education from a cross-cultural perspective, triangulating the findings from the quantitative instruments (ESIT and MFQ), qualitative methods (student and faculty interviews), with contextual information about programs of study. This part of the project will help us (1) gain a culturally responsive interpretation of the results obtained from the ESIT and MFQ; (2) examine whether and how the two instruments work in assessing students’ ethical development in the cross-cultural context; and (3) compare how different (extra-)curricular and institutional interventions affect students’ ethical development in different cultures.

This paper offers an overview of the progress to date of our NSF funded research project, synthesizing the preliminary findings from year 1 of the baseline study, providing some initial analysis of the results from years 1 and 2, and discussing the development of the conceptual and methodological foundations for the case study analysis.