Ethics as an outcome of out-of-class engagement across diverse groups of engineering students

Abstract

ABSTRACT Engineers need to prioritise public welfare and understand how their decisions affect social and environmental systems. These responsibilities require engineers to uphold high ethical standards and undergraduate education is a formative time for ethical development. Although ethics have been part of the formal curriculum in the United States, Europe, and Australia for the past few decades, there are persistent challenges in equipping future engineers with ethics-related skills. Current course-based approaches might be insufficient since the curriculum is already packed with technical content. The present research was situated in a socio-ecological framework of engagement and used survey responses to explore ethical standards as an outcome of undergraduate engineering students’ participation in out-of-class activities. The research design sought to examine differential perceptions based on types of activity and student demographics given the importance of population and context in understanding engagement. The results indicated a range of activities in which students perceived ethical standards as an outcome. The results indicated that perceptions of attaining ethics and correlation with other outcomes varied by setting and students’ gender and race/ethnicity. The results illuminate opportunities to leverage out-of-class activities to support the development of ethics and the importance of considering the contextual nuances of engagement.