2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

This project aims to develop engineers who are not only proficient in technical skills but also deeply attuned to ethical considerations and global challenges. Modern engineers have an essential role in shaping society, driving innovation, and addressing complex, multidisciplinary problems that impact communities. However, there remains a critical gap in how engineering students engage with the broader ethical and societal dimensions of their work. Prior research, has highlighted that undergraduate engineering students often feel detached from the social and cultural responsibilities of their profession. This project directly responds to calls for more effective strategies to foster a sense of moral agency and societal engagement in future engineers.

The project is funded by the National Science Foundation’s Improving Undergraduate STEM Education (IUSE) program and is piloting a new pedagogical framework that combines established reflective practice techniques from cognitive design theory with novel methods of coupled ethical-epistemic analysis from the field of philosophy. These strategies will be integrated into both classroom settings and research environments across multiple engineering disciplines to assess their effectiveness. The primary objective is to explore how these combined approaches influence students’ ability to engage with the ethical dimensions of engineering and cultivate moral agency.
The exploratory nature of this study involves three key tasks. First, it examines whether participation in undergraduate research employing coupled ethical-epistemic analysis contributes to the development of moral agency among engineering students. Second, it investigates how implementing coupled ethical-epistemic pedagogy in classroom settings impacts students’ ethical engagement. Finally, the study assesses how variations in teaching methods and subject matter influence the effectiveness of this approach. To date, we have completed two semesters of undergraduate research employing coupled ethical-epistemic analysis and one semester of classroom data collection. Our results show positive changes in student scores on ethical principle identification, recognizing the ethical dilemma, assessing viewpoints across stakeholders, determining coherence across ethical principles to identify potential resolution, and reflective analysis of the proposed solution after completing a REU experience.

Through this initiative, we seek to contribute new insights into engineering ethics education by filling gaps in current pedagogy and identifying mechanisms that can enhance students' ability to address society-relevant issues. By presenting this work as a project-in-progress, we aim to generate discussion and feedback from the ASEE community, which will inform the next stages of implementation and further refine our iterative research design to better support student learning outcomes.

This work aligns with the NSF's focus on improving the quality of undergraduate education and preparing students to meet the complex demands of the engineering profession with both technical expertise and ethical insight.