2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

The Development of a Student Survey on Macroethics in Aerospace Engineering [Work-In-Progress]

Presented at Decision-Making in Engineering Ethics Education

This work-in-progress paper presents the development of a survey designed to understand undergraduate aerospace engineering students’ views on macroethics in the field. Macroethics describes the real world ethical implications of engineering technology and the collective social responsibility of the aerospace engineering profession. As macroethics education is currently lacking in most undergraduate aerospace curricula in the United States, we are developing a survey intended to measure students’ current perceptions, knowledge, and beliefs about macroethics in the field. Insight into our students’ current beliefs and perceptions is imperative to develop new curricula and more generally alter the culture and direction of the aerospace engineering field from striving for apoliticalization to embracing the sociotechnical.

A mixed-methods survey was taken by 158 undergraduate aerospace engineering students at two large, research-intensive universities in the United States. This paper presents confirmatory and exploratory factor analyses of Likert-scale data to further the development of the survey. The survey items were initially designed to address two proposed research questions:

RQ1. To what degree are students aware of the importance of macroethical issues in the field of aerospace engineering?

RQ2. Do aerospace engineering students feel that their undergraduate education is preparing them to address macroethical issues?

While confirmatory factor analysis does not confirm these two survey constructs for which the survey items were designed, an exploratory factor analysis results in five factors, each highlighting a different aspect of students’ perceptions of macroethical aerospace engineering education:

1. The criticality of the relationship between aerospace engineering and society
2. The ease or difficulty of being an ethical aerospace engineer
3. Technical determinism and aerospace career pathways
4. Macroethics discussions within aerospace coursework
5. The ability of faculty to facilitate conversations on the macroethics of aerospace

These five factors provide a new basis upon which we will generate additional survey items in the future. Through this process, we will develop a survey that can effectively measure students’ beliefs and experiences in regards to the macroethical implications of the field of aerospace engineering.

Authors

Dr. Corin L. Bowen http://orcid.org/0000-0002-0910-8902 California State University, Los Angeles [biography]

Corin (Corey) Bowen is an Assistant Professor of Engineering Education, housed in the Department of Civil Engineering at California State University - Los Angeles. Her engineering education research focuses on structural oppression in engineering systems, organizing for equitable change, and developing an agenda of Engineering for the Common Good. She teaches structural mechanics and sociotechnical topics in engineering education and practice. Corey conferred her Ph.D. in aerospace engineering from the University of Michigan - Ann Arbor in April 2021; her thesis included both technical and educational research. She also holds an M.S.E. in aerospace engineering from the University of Michigan - Ann Arbor and a B.S.E. in civil engineering from Case Western Reserve University, both in the areas of structural engineering and solid mechanics.
Ms. Elizabeth Ann Strehl University of Michigan [biography]

Elizabeth is a graduate student at the University of Michigan studying Engineering Education Research under doctoral advisor Aaron Johnson. Her research focuses on weaving macro ethics into existing aerospace engineering curricula and institutional support methods for working class engineering students. Elizabeth earned her undergraduate degree from the University of Michigan in 2019 with foci in Biomedical Engineering and Applied Mathematics.
Megan Ennis University of Michigan [biography]

Megan Ennis is a master’s student in aerospace engineering and a research assistant with the SHUTTLE Lab at the University of Michigan. After completing a B.S. in aerospace engineering at the University of Michigan, she spent a year at University of Cambridge for a master’s in gender studies. She returned to Michigan and is now enjoying her time as a graduate student instructor. Beyond being involved in the lab’s macroethics work, Megan's research interest is to apply feminist theories to engineering education.
Andrew Benham
Dr. Aaron W. Johnson University of Michigan [biography]

Aaron W. Johnson (he/him) is an Assistant Professor in the Aerospace Engineering Department and a Core Faculty member of the Engineering Education Research Program at the University of Michigan. His lab’s design-based research focuses on how to re-contextualize engineering science engineering courses to better reflect and prepare students for the reality of ill-defined, sociotechnical engineering practice. Their current projects include studying and designing classroom interventions around macroethical issues in aerospace engineering and the productive beginnings of engineering judgment as students create and use mathematical models. Aaron holds a B.S. in Aerospace Engineering from U-M, and a Ph.D. in Aeronautics and Astronautics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Prior to re-joining U-M, he was an instructor in Aerospace Engineering Sciences at the University of Colorado Boulder.

Download paper (2.26 MB)

Are you a researcher? Would you like to cite this paper? Visit the ASEE document repository at peer.asee.org for more tools and easy citations.

» Download paper

« View session