2026 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

As artificial intelligence becomes embedded in higher education, discipline-specific chatbot design offers new opportunities to enhance learning, reflection, and ethical awareness. This work-in-progress project explores how chatbot interventions can be adapted to strengthen engineering students’ conceptual understanding and professional responsibility. Specifically, the study draws on a reflective-ethical reasoning chatbot, which engages students in guided metacognitive dialogue, and facilitates scenario-based ethical decision-making.
By integrating these pedagogical approaches into engineering courses such as Introduction to Engineering, the project aims to promote deeper cognitive engagement beyond problem-solving. The reflective-ethical chatbot presents context-rich dilemmas that prompt students to weigh technical, environmental, and societal factors using professional codes of ethics. To assess the effectiveness of these interventions, preliminary analyses will compare student performance in selected assignments before and after chatbot implementation. Additionally, surveys will be conducted to measure students’ awareness of their problem-solving strategies, conceptual understanding, and common misconceptions, providing indirect evidence to triangulate with performance-based measures.
The chatbot interventions aim to enhance conceptual understanding, ethical awareness, and reflective judgment in engineering learners, offering a transferable and scalable model for integrating AI-driven reflection and ethics instruction across the engineering curriculum.