2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Engineering education commonly deemphasizes the moral and ethical teaching required for future engineers. Measuring the ethical values that engineering students and professionals possess, and how those views change over time, is a challenging prospect given the complexity of such concepts. One proposed method to characterize a person’s moral development is by asking them to identify a moral exemplar. In this paper, we explore who engineering students and early-career engineering professionals identify as moral exemplars and the traits and characteristics they use to describe these moral exemplars.

The data used in this paper comes from a series of two longitudinal, mixed-methods projects which explored engineering students’ and professionals’ perceptions of ethics and social responsibility. During these projects, three interviews were conducted with longitudinal participants: one at the start of the first year of their engineering undergraduate studies (T1, n = 112), a second during their senior year (T2, n = 33), and a third 2-3 years after they graduated and started their engineering careers (T3, n = 20). This study focuses on interviewees' responses to one question: “Can you identify and describe someone, (for example, someone you know, a historical figure, or a famous person), that you think exemplifies moral character or professional or personal integrity?”

In this paper, we identify and categorize the identities of these chosen moral exemplars. The list of categories was made and modified according to the trends we saw in moral exemplars of the engineering students. Occasionally, we had trouble determining how to categorize a response and, as a result, would put the moral exemplar into two categories.

Additionally, we analyze the traits interviewees use to describe their moral exemplars, with the Big 5 Personality Traits used as an analytical framework [2]. When studying the personality traits of the moral exemplars, we would rank them from 1-10 depending on if they either positively (10) or negatively (1) align with the traits [2]. If the trait was not described, we would rank them a 0.

From our analysis, a few notable patterns emerged. In T1, the largest category was family members accounting for 38% of the moral exemplars. In T2, family members were again the largest category, but now made up 22% of the moral exemplars. Additionally, around 60% of both the T1 and T2 participants cited their moral exemplars as someone they know personally. Interestingly the gender of the Moral exemplars for T1 and T2 is 68% male, 14% female and 18% other/not specified.

We plan to compare the gender of the interviewees with the moral exemplars they identified to understand if there was any correlation between the two factors. We are also investigating longitudinal changes over time in the categories of the moral exemplars identified by participants. Finally, we are also comparing the personality traits of the moral exemplars described by our young engineer participants to prior work investigating the personalities of moral exemplars.