2026 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

This project, supported by the National Science Foundation’s Improving Undergraduate STEM Education: Engaged Student Learning (IUSE:ESL) program (Level 2), aims to serve the national interest by improving both educational interventions for and assessments of engineering students’ ethical judgments. Ethical lapses in engineering practice have repeatedly resulted in loss of life, environmental damage, and public mistrust. From the Challenger and Columbia shuttle disasters to the Volkswagen emissions scandal, the Flint water crisis, the Boeing 737 MAX crashes, and the East Palestine train derailment, such failures continue to occur across engineering domains [1-5].[BD1.1] To help prevent such failures, educators and psychologists have long sought to assess ethical judgment through scenario-based tools such as the Defining Issues Test [6], Moral Judgment Interview [7], and Engineering Ethical Reasoning Instrument [8]. However, these instruments often emphasize abstract moral reasoning and third-person case analyses, which may not translate to real-world first-person decision making under pressure [9]. Building on theories of situated and embodied cognition [10,11], ethical judgment must be studied and cultivated in context-rich, first-person environments that mirror the complex, uncertain conditions of real engineering practice. Understanding how to better teach and prepare engineering students to make improved and more ethical judgments in practice will have broad, positive societal and economic benefits. To this end, this project includes a game-based engineering classroom intervention that immerses students in realistic, narrative scenarios where they must navigate complex ethical decision making and justify their personal choices. This foundation enables the present study’s investigation into how contextual framing influences ethical judgment.

To examine how ethical judgment operates within a context-rich, first-person learning environment, this study asks: How does differentially contextualizing information in an ethical dilemma impact student judgment? The game-based educational intervention Mars! An Ethical Expedition (Mars![da3.1]) is being used to collect a database of student narrative responses to engineering-contextualized ethical dilemmas. By changing the contextual information provided to different students surrounding the dilemmas, it was hypothesized that students can be induced to approach ethical judgments in a more situated manner. The digital format enables these contextual differences to be deployed efficiently to large cohorts, facilitating data collection and analysis of student ethical decisions through text-based responses and choice distributions.

Initial findings indicate that contextual framing can significantly influence students’ ethical decisions. Our results suggest that significant framing effects occurred in three scenarios where contextual details about transparency, institutional precedent, or personal relationships measurably shifted students’ choices. These findings support the view that ethical judgment is situated and context dependent, emerging from the specific details of each scenario rather than from fixed moral principles. However, additional research is needed to determine which effects are most pronounced, including the types of contextual clues and their placement within the narrative.