2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

In many U.S. engineering education programs, ethics is a general learning outcome. While the appeal of ethics as a learning outcome comes from its presumed universality, its application is inevitably situational, developed in response to needs and aspirations of communities of learners, as well as to institutions’ norms and expectations. Ethical concerns and actions in engineering research are largely dependent on the field of research, the kind of research methods employed, the nature of research partnerships, and the configuration of research infrastructure. A robust culture of responsible research thus needs facilitators and connectors who do the ‘work of translation’ among various actors including students, faculty, staff, the higher education institution, and a range of local and national entities that make and enforce laws and regulations. In the U.S. a great deal of this type of ‘translation’ happens through the Institutional Review Board (IRB) submission and review process. This paper documents the findings of a year-long self-study involving an interdisciplinary group of 5 faculty members and the director of the Human Subjects Research program at Worcester Polytechnic Institute. The self-study asked: what are the primary challenges for leveraging the IRB process for intentional and reflective ethics learning in multidisciplinary engineering settings?

Through a critical examination of already-existing research ethics training opportunities in undergraduate project advising, the study identified two major challenges: cultivating researcher identity and human impacts of research.
1. The first challenge is the tendency among students to shy away from building a strong sense of researcher identity in student projects that have research components. Most students assume that research is a discovery of something that was non-existent. This assumption does not take into account the fact that research (a) happens through various types of inquiries (discovery, synthesis, or application), and (b) knowledge creation can be gradual, cumulative, or nonlinear, and is rarely a leap to an unknown place. From research ethics pedagogy, this is especially troublesome because if students do not actively identify themselves as researchers, they tend to approach research ethics as a bureaucratic formality and not a matter of personal responsibility.
2. The second is about the difficulty that students have in identifying ‘humans’ that may be impacted by research. This is especially a challenge for research projects involving technology. Many undergraduate research projects at this engineering school involve the design, development, test, implementation, analysis, and use of technologies. Techno-centrism (at the expense of a human-centric approach) is not unique to undergraduate researchers. Many of the ethical problems with current commercialized technologies such as facial recognition systems are indeed a reflection of the widespread techno-centrism in the tech industry. In such a techno-centric framing, either humans become means to achieve the goal of the technological system or ethical concerns about humans only appear as after-thoughts.

We argue that these two challenges carry a significant potential to become the vehicles that can create meaningful and transformative engagements with the IRB. From the perspective of ‘ethics training across curriculum’, the intellectual space that the IRB provides is crucial to connect pedagogical practices across various research areas. By encouraging ‘what if’ inquiries, the IRB application process takes student researchers away from their comfort zones. Our findings suggest a shift from research ethics—wherein ethics is seen primarily as something that is dealt with after research questions and activities are prepared—to the ethics of research—wherein students are trained to see research design itself as an ethical inquiry. This shift can provide a framework for engineering students to understand the human dimensions of their work and the need for skill building for ethical conduct of research.