Ethical Preparedness, Self-Efficacy and Challenges in Engineering Education – A Quantitative Study

Abstract

Academicians and practitioners in engineering focus on promoting ethical behaviour in their field. Engineering ethics are essential for maintaining public faith in the field and its professionals, especially as engineers rapidly face global and socially complicated issues that involve technical and ethical challenges. Unethical engineering exposes companies to legal action, financial constraints, and decreased effectiveness. To enhance ethical awareness about one’s own ethical self- efficacy, ethical preparedness and the associated ethical challenges, ethical instructions are to be developed among students successfully. With this as the motivation, an attempt is made in this study to develop a survey instrument to capture the freshmen engineering students’ understanding related to ethical preparedness, ethical challenges, and ethical self-efficacy. Considering these three aspects, a survey instrument was created and distributed at an affiliated (autonomous) college in south India (Hyderabad Institute of Technology and Management) during spring 2021 to the freshman engineering students. Exploratory factor analysis was conducted to determine the factor structure of the survey instrument and it results in three factors as hypothesized. The factors had a minimum and maximum loading of 0.56 and 0.90 and Cronbach’s α ranged from 0.83 to 0.88. This instrument could be used by institutions willing to assess students’ current levels of awareness regarding engineering ethics and decide nextsteps accordingly. Keywords: ethical challenges, ethical self-efficacy, engineering ethics, freshman engineering students