Institutional Differences in the Education of Engineering and Computing Students About Ethics and Societal Impacts (original) (raw)
Related papers
2018 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition Proceedings, 2020
Boulder in the Department of Civil, Environmental, and Architectural Engineering (CEAE). She has served as the Associate Chair for Undergraduate Education in the CEAE Department, as well as the ABET assessment coordinator. Professor Bielefeldt was also the faculty director of the Sustainable By Design Residential Academic Program, a livinglearning community where interdisciplinary students learn about and practice sustainability. Bielefeldt is also a licensed P.E. Professor Bielefeldt's research interests in engineering education include servicelearning, sustainable engineering, social responsibility, ethics, and diversity.
2018 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition Proceedings
Boulder in the Department of Civil, Environmental, and Architectural Engineering (CEAE). She has served as the Associate Chair for Undergraduate Education in the CEAE Department, as well as the ABET assessment coordinator. Professor Bielefeldt was also the faculty director of the Sustainable By Design Residential Academic Program, a livinglearning community where interdisciplinary students learn about and practice sustainability. Bielefeldt is also a licensed P.E. Professor Bielefeldt's research interests in engineering education include servicelearning, sustainable engineering, social responsibility, ethics, and diversity.
2019 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition Proceedings
Boulder in the Department of Civil, Environmental, and Architectural Engineering (CEAE). She has served as the Associate Chair for Undergraduate Education in the CEAE Department, as well as the ABET assessment coordinator. Professor Bielefeldt was also the faculty director of the Sustainable By Design Residential Academic Program, a livinglearning community where interdisciplinary students learn about and practice sustainability. Bielefeldt is also a licensed P.E. Professor Bielefeldt's research interests in engineering education include servicelearning, sustainable engineering, social responsibility, ethics, and diversity.
Science and Engineering Ethics, 2020
Cultivating an understanding of ethical responsibilities and the societal impacts of technology is increasingly recognized as an important component in undergraduate engineering curricula. There is growing research on how ethics-related topics are taught and outcomes are attained, especially in the context of accreditation criteria. However, there is a lack of theoretical and empirical understanding of the role that educators play in ethics and societal impacts (ESI) instruction and the factors that motivate and shape their inclusion of this subject in the courses they teach and cocurricular activities they mentor. The goal of this research was to explore the role of faculty's personal influences on their inclusion of ESI instruction in these settings. Personal influences are distinguished from external or environmental drivers such as teaching assignments, university policies, and department curriculum decisions. This research employed a grounded theory methodology and extracted data from interviews with 19 educators who teach ESI to engineering students to develop an emergent conceptualization of personal influences. Four categorie were identified: intrapersonal (drawing on self-interests and beliefs), interpersonal (drawing on relationships to engage in the intersectional field of ESI), academic (using their experiences as a student), and professional (leveraging non-academic work to understand the application of ESI and bring ESI into the classroom). The findings suggested a wide range of entry points (based on varying interests, beliefs, interactions, and backgrounds) into ESI instruction for faculty members who do not currently teach ESI and for those looking to expand the inclusion of ESI in their courses. Based on these findings, departments and administrators are encouraged to foster educators' agency, support access to professional development and engagement, facilitate interdisciplinary collaboration, and broaden hiring decisions to account for the impact of educators' holistic identity on their instruction.
Broadening and deepening engineering students’ perspectives on morality and ethics
2017
With the primary tenant of the National Society of Professional Engineers (NSPE) articulating that engineers shall “hold paramount the safety, health, and welfare of the public,” and other professional engineering societies using the same or similar language, engineers need broader and deeper understanding of moral and ethical theories that can help them understand and make ethically informed decisions about their designs. Ethical understanding is necessary for engineers to determine the appropriateness of pursuing projects and to think through how these are likely to be used in current systems. From common devices to complex systems, the technology engineers design profoundly shape society and change our environment, which in turns affects society. As complex systems become more pervasive into our everyday lives, ethical decisions regarding technology and policy require engineers to consider multiple moral theories in more depth than “do the greatest good.” With this guiding though...
Learning and Teaching Ethics in Engineering: Preparing Engineering Faculty to Teach Ethics
Through assessment processes recently put into place, many engineering departments at Penn State identified a need to enhance the ethics components of their curricula. To support departments in their enhancement processes, the College of Engineering worked with the College of the Liberal Arts to create a faculty development program to prepare engineering faculty to teach ethics, entitled, "Learning and Teaching Ethics in Engineering." The program was designed to allow engineering faculty to gain some background in ethics and to develop ethics activities for their courses and methods for assessing them. This paper provides a description of the program, a summary of the learning objectives, instructional approaches, assessment methods developed by the participants, and a summary of the assessments of the effectiveness of the program. CEE, 3 required junior level courses, 1 sophomore level course, and 3 first year seminars. These courses enroll approximately 1000 engineering students annually.
2017 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition Proceedings
Boulder in the Department of Civil, Environmental, and Architectural Engineering (CEAE). She has served as the the ABET assessment coordinator for her department since 2008. Professor Bielefeldt is the faculty director of the Sustainable By Design Residential Academic Program, a living-learning community where interdisciplinary students learn about and practice sustainability. Bielefeldt is also a licensed P.E. Professor Bielefeldt's research interests in engineering education include service-learning, sustainable engineering, social responsibility, ethics, and diversity.
Which Factors are Correlated with Engineering Students' Expectations of Ethical Issues
2017 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition, Columbus, Ohio, 2017
Our presentation discusses a project exploring correlations between engineering students’ anticipations of ethical issues and other factors, including, for example, past education, work experience, instructor conduct, etc. On this basis, recommendations are made for improving engineering ethics education. This project is motivated by the importance of ethical conduct by engineers and research regarding the efficacy of ethics education. For better and worse, engineers and the technologies with which they work profoundly impact human life and the environment. Towards this end, it is important that engineers act in an ethical manner. However, recent findings in engineering education, ethics, and psychology call into question the efficacy of teaching ethics: Traditional approaches to ethics do not seem to have their intended effects, of more ethical actions. A growing body of literature shows unethical actions result less from individuals making decisions to act unethically and more from an inability to see choices as having ethical import, resulting in many cases from biases based on human psychology and environmental factors. Based on previous empirical studies regarding engineering students’ knowledge of and views about ethics, this paper presents the findings of a study aimed at determining which factors are correlated with engineering students’ expectations of confronting ethical issues. Theoretically, individuals who anticipate being faced with ethical issues and conflicts would be better aware of the ethical dimensions of situations and, therefore, better capable of employing ethical reasoning and acting in an ethical manner. Hence, the goal of this research is to identify which factors might have an effect on students’ expectations of facing ethical issues, examining, for example, past education, work experience, instructor conduct, etc. Our presentation discusses the results of this research and, on this basis, makes recommendations regarding how to improve ethics education in general and engineering ethics education specifically.