2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

An ethics across the curriculum approach is often developed as either engineering faculty and students participating in an interdisciplinary effort or engineering departments implementing ethics education across multiple engineering classes. Most of the literature studying ethics across the curriculum focuses on institutions which do either the former or the latter, but not both simultaneously. However, assessment of student learning outcomes showed that if both approaches are used simultaneously and are purposefully connected with each other, the capacity of students to identify ethical systems and practical foundations for making judgments is improved, and students are better able to apply an ethical system to value judgments.

As part of an intermediate engineering design class, students were assigned an essay in which they connected engineering codes with a chosen system of ethics. The instructor assessment of the first iteration of this assignment noted that some students had difficulties describing the basic tenets of an ethical system beyond a single characteristic statement and often conflated their own personal lived ethic with a formal system of ethics. A revision to this assignment included requiring students to read briefings of several formal ethical systems. These briefings were excerpts from the assigned course pack from an ethics and policy class in the Core sequence, a set of worldview and ethics classes required for all students in the university and collectively taught by faculty from departments across the university, including engineering. This improved the students’ understanding of ethical systems and also reinforced concepts from Core. Outcomes were measured by ABET assessment tools developed by the department. The fraction of students that struggled to describe the basic tenets of an ethical system was reduced by a factor of three, and the fraction of students that could clearly support judgments with ethical tenets increased from 40% to 64%.

In addition to the pedagogical modification, several things enhanced the student learning experience that have implications for how educators and institutions can effectively deliver ethics education. First, having an assessment plan covers both microethics and macroethics encourages forming the connections between them. Second, a mindset of interconnectivity among classes is crucial. Third, participation from engineering department faculty in the general education components enables them to make these cross-curricular connections. Lastly, faculty mentoring and training help achieve this shared goal. Future directions could include making these intentional connections common throughout other classes in the engineering curriculum, including both studio design classes and engineering analysis classes.