Engineering Ethics Course Research Articles

A Rubik’s Cube-Inspired Pedagogical Tool for Teaching and Learning Engineering Ethics

To facilitate engineering students’ understanding of engineering ethics and support instructors in developing course content, this study introduces an innovative educational tool drawing inspiration from the Rubik’s Cube metaphor. This Engineering Ethics Knowledge Rubik’s Cube (EEKRC) integrates six key aspects—ethical theories, codes of ethics, ethical issues, engineering disciplines, stakeholders, and life cycle—identified through an analysis of engineering ethics textbooks and courses across the United States, Singapore, and China. This analysis underpins the selection of the six aspects, reflecting the shared and unique elements of engineering ethics education in these regions. In an engineering ethics course, the EEKRC serves multiple functions: it provides visual support for grasping engineering ethics concepts, acts as a pedagogical guide for both experienced and inexperienced educators in course design, offers a complementary assessment method for evaluating students learning outcomes, and assists as a reference for students engaging in ethical analysis.

Exploration and Practice of Teaching “Engineering Ethic” for Professional Degree Graduate Students Under the Background of “New Engineering”

Under the background of new engineering and curriculum ideological and political construction, the ethics education of engineering ethics courses for engineering graduate students must be constantly explored and tried. Based on the actual situation of the training of professional degree graduate students in our university, this paper starts from various aspects such as teaching content, teaching methods, textbook cases and comprehensive assessment. This paper probes into the course construction and teaching reform of engineering ethics for engineering graduate students, and explores the mode of engineering ethics education which adapts to the needs of our country’s own development.

Big data ethics and its role in the innovation and technology adoption process

PurposeUpon graduating from university, many engineers will work in new product development and/or technology adoption for continuous improvement and production optimization. These jobs require employees to be cognizant of ethical practices and implications for design. However, little engineering coursework, outside the traditional ABET (Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology) required Engineering Ethics course, accounts for the role of ethics within this process. Because of this, engineering students have few learning opportunities to practice and reflect on ethical decision-making.Design/methodology/approachThis paper highlights one approach to integrating ethics into an engineering course (outside of engineering ethics). Specifically, the study is implemented within a five-week module with a focus on big data ethics, as part of a Supply Chain Management Technology course (required for Industrial Engineering Technology majors), using metacognition as the core assessment.FindingsFour main themes were identified through the qualitative data analysis of the metacognitive reflections: (1) overreliance on content knowledge, (2) time management skills, (3) career connections and (4) knowledge extensions.Originality/valueThree notable points emerged which contribute to the literature. First, this study showcased one example of how an ethics module can be integrated into an engineering course (other than Engineering Ethics). Second, this study demonstrated how metacognitive reflections can be used to reinforce student self-awareness of the learning process and connections to big data ethics in the workplace. Finally, this study exhibited how metacognitive reflection assignments can be deployed as a teaching and learning assessment tool, providing an opportunity for the instructor to make immediate changes as needed.

Exploring the Teaching Reform of Industry-Education Integration in Engineering Ethics and Project Management Course

Engineering ethics and project management are the most extendable courses in the quality course group, which is the characteristic core curriculum system of measurement and control technology and instrument specialty. This course is divided into two parts: engineering ethics and engineering project management. In view of the society's increasing emphasis on engineering ethics and the key role of engineering project management in solving complex engineering problems, the traditional purely theoretical teaching method is no longer suitable for the new teaching needs in the contemporary context. Therefore, in order to improve the teaching quality and the students' learning effect of the extensible and open knowledge, the major of measurement and control technology and instrument of Changzhou Institute of Technology invited the technical directors of representative enterprises in the industry such as Changzhou Promise Management Consulting Co., Ltd. to analyze the classroom cases of relevant knowledge, so as to realize the teaching reform of industry education integration of joint teaching between schools and enterprises. Bring the latest industrial status and development trend of measurement and control technology and instrument technology into classroom teaching, effectively improve teaching quality, and deeply cultivate students' engineering ethics and project management awareness.

The Application Study of Engineering and Science Issues Test in China’s Postgraduate Engineering Ethics Course

In China, many universities have realized that they need to increase the weight of ethics education. Using Engineering and Science Issues Test as a measurement tool, this paper conducts a quasi-experimental study on the teaching effect of the “Scientific Ethics and Academic Integrity” course. Engineering ethics education has a significant positive effect on postgraduates’ moral judgment and awareness. There are statistically significant differences in scores between work experience and domicile. Teaching science and engineering ethics courses is an effective way to improve students’ ethical judgment and awareness. Curriculum contents can be adjusted appropriately for students with different domicile and working backgrounds.

The Logic of "Engineering Ethics" Module in Master of Engineering Education

Since China joined the Washington Accord, engineering ethics has become an indispensable part of engineering education. However, the course of "engineering ethics" is a new subject for today’s engineers in China. Every teacher would face questions concerning the connection between engineering and ethics, the teaching objectives of the course, and the applicability of the current teaching methods in the engineering and ethics courses. By participating in engineering activities on-site and interviewing engineers and scientists to understand engineering, we have looked for answers for the above questions over the last 20 years’ teaching and innovated teaching methods, and tried to find basic logic for the course for better outcomes. The engineering ethics module for masters of engineering includes four sub-systems: ethical value,engineering thinking, teaching objectives and teaching methods. This article illuminates their functions and connections and analyzes the logic of engineering ethics courses.

An Action Research in Critical Thinking Concept Designed Curriculum Based on Collaborative Learning for Engineering Ethics Course

(1) Background: Critical thinking, CT, contributes to success in both career and higher education, and may be more important than professional content knowledge. Nevertheless, it is challenging to cultivate CT in a standalone course, especially for the engineering students who think less critically than those in other colleges. (2) Methods: This research incorporated CT concept into 18 weeks curriculum of Engineering·ethics and Society course, with the assistance of collaborative learning process for formative assessment and problem-based learning for summative assessment, in addition to 3 questionnaires to evaluate the progress in CT and collaboration. (3) Results: Both measurements in CT and collaboration improved significantly. In general, the participants enjoyed the course materials and thought these CT and values infused course activities were helpful to the learning. On the other hand, CT was also the most noticeable problem. About one over every five participants lacked the habit to think, while 17% of participants were afraid of complex questions to think. In addition, 10% doubted their CT skills. It concludes that total 46% participants thought CT is their most crucial shortage. (4) Conclusions: the pretest demonstrated the CT of the participants was below the college norm; fortunately, the assistance of the social interaction, including team work practices, peer evaluation, and pressure to push individuals work harder and think deeper, did promote their CT cognitive development.

Training responsible engineers. Phronesis and the role of virtues in teaching engineering ethics

ABSTRACT Engineering ethics courses aim to improve students’ ethical competence by developing skills such as ethical sensitivity, awareness, analysis and judgement. We present a type of virtue engineering ethics that bridges the gap between academic knowledge (in both ethics and engineering) and its application in engineering practice (particularly design). To clarify why learning about virtues can enrich students’ ethical thinking and competences, we specifically consider the virtue of practical wisdom, phronesis. At the core of the paper, we put forward a theoretical argument for including phronesis in teaching ethics within innovation courses. Training this virtue will help engineering students in dealing with the various uncertainties that will emerge from their future engineering practices. With regard to implementing our proposal, we suggest to integrate practical wisdom in ‘semi-technical’ courses that combine theoretical in-class learning and practical design experiences. We discuss the structure, aims and assessment methods of an integrated product development course that we deem preferable to and potentially more effective than stand-alone engineering ethics classes. An engineering virtue ethics can help engineering students develop a personal reflective way of thinking about concrete courses of action in engineering practice, and may have beneficial ripple effects on their lives, society and the environment.

Steps toward a Philosophy of Engineering: Historico-Philosophical and Critical Essays by Carl Mitcham

Reviewed by: Steps toward a Philosophy of Engineering: Historico-Philosophical and Critical Essays by Carl Mitcham Cyrus C. M. Mody (bio) Steps toward a Philosophy of Engineering: Historico-Philosophical and Critical Essays By Carl Mitcham. London: Rowman and Littlefield International, 2020. Pp. 466. Steps toward a Philosophy of Engineering: Historico-Philosophical and Critical Essays By Carl Mitcham. London: Rowman and Littlefield International, 2020. Pp. 466. Philosophy has many specialties: the "traditional ethics-politics-epistemology-ontology fourfold" of Western philosophy as well as narrower "regionalizations" such as bioethics or the philosophies of science, language, mind, religion, art, etc. (p. 352). One region that was missing from the philosophical map until recently—and is still hardly colored in—is the philosophy of engineering. Sure, many universities offer engineering ethics courses, and there is a long tradition of philosopher-engineers such as Walter Vincenti. But philosophers interested in what engineers do—well, that's a select group. No one has done more to put engineering on philosophy's map than [End Page 602] Carl Mitcham, both through his own writing and teaching and via tireless institution-building and collaboration. The present volume collects some of those writings (several of them co-authored) as a kind of survey of the field of philosophy of engineering. As the book's title hints, philosophy of engineering is still so new—especially compared to philosophy of science and even philosophy of technology—that any overview must be fragmentary, tentative, and tangled. Anyone looking for a synoptic presentation of the philosophy of engineering will have to wait. But as an introduction to a terra incognita, this collection of Mitcham's essays is a clearly-written, generous, and thoughtful guide. In other words, the volume as a whole should be assigned reading in graduate and advanced undergraduate courses, and some of the individual essays can go on syllabi for introductory or survey courses with an ENG, PHIL, STS, or HUMA prefix. As a book to read cover-to-cover, Steps toward a Philosophy of Engineering possesses both the charms and tics of any collection of previously published essays. There is, for instance, a fair bit of repetition. In particular, Thomas Tredgold's definition of engineering is offered at least six separate times. Not that repetition is all bad—some of Mitcham's points are planted in one essay and bloom in another. The essays also sometimes lurch from one topic to something entirely different, reflecting Mitcham's diverse interests. Thankfully, the conclusion summarizes all the chapters and shows how they relate to each other. Several chapters end with strange codas, perhaps to set them apart from their published versions. Some are quite interesting—for example, one on Harry Truman's penchant for Hegel—but others are rather elusive. Finally, I have to note that the copyediting is mediocre, especially in the later essays. Whomever Rowman and Littlefield assigned did not do a job worthy of this volume. Mitcham's starting point is the observation that engineering is philosophically "inadequate." That is, whatever philosophical definition of engineering you choose, it has something to do with the social good, and yet critical understandings of the social good and how to contribute to it are almost entirely missing from engineering's technical canon and curriculum. This may or may not separate engineering from other professions—Mitcham makes that claim but then very generously offers (and mostly defers to) David Goldberg's counterargument. Either way, engineering sorely needs a critical perspective on its aims and conduct; and that requires engagement with philosophy, science and technology studies, and other fields comprising the interdisciplinary constellation of engineering studies. History is in that mix; Mitcham is a fan of this journal, and several essays survey the history of concepts and movements such as sustainable development, humanitarianism, and engineering ethics, sometimes via crossnational comparisons. Mitcham explores various ways of overcoming engineering's philosophical inadequacy by offering various critical analyses of concepts like [End Page 603] "energy," "policy," and more. But the theme that runs throughout is what he calls engineering plus respicere—the obligation for engineers to take more into account and acknowledge the limits of technical knowledge. The profession's military roots and managerial responsibilities mean...

A Pilot Study to Incorporate Collaboration and Energy Competency into an Engineering Ethics Course

According to the OECD, The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, and other education policy experts all over the world, an urgent reform is needed to promote education innovation with “competencies” as the core. To investigate the feasibility to apply competency-oriented education, this pilot study surveyed the competencies of “collaboration” and “energy” and applied competency-oriented contents into an Engineering Ethics course in the Department of Mechanical Engineering. The literature reveals that collaboration includes three constructs: trust, communication, and coordination. These constructs were used to develop a questionnaire and to survey the collaboration competency of the research subjects. In addition, an energy perception survey for Taiwan was used to compare and analyze the energy competencies between the research subject and the general adults in Taiwan. Finally, some suggestions are proposed for competency implementation in future courses.

Attitude towards Engineering Ethical Issues: A Comparative Study between Malaysian and Indonesian Engineering Undergraduates

This investigation reports the outcomes of a comparative study on attitude towards engineering ethical issues between engineering undergraduates of Malaysia and Indonesia. The study was conducted involving 83 Malaysian and 135 Indonesian undergraduates who pursuing their study in engineering programmes. A quantitative method was used in which a questionnaire was administrated to elicit relevant data. The results of the data analysis showed that the attitude towards engineering ethical issues among Indonesian engineering students was positive and significantly higher than Malaysian engineering students. These findings revealed that various pedagogical approaches for teaching engineering ethics course will have positive impact on students' attitude towards ethics. Therefore, the study findings opens up a new dimension in ethics education which highlighting the importance of teaching strategies in developing the attitude towards engineering ethical issues. This is vital in facilitating in the development of holistic and ethical engineers.

The Teaching Assumption of Engineering Ethics Course from the Perspective of General Education

<p>The concept of general education is an educational concept produced by the comparison with the professional education and an educational mode in higher education. Engineering ethics is a new subject based on the development of humanities and science. The organic combination of the two can help students get better and more comprehensive development. This paper mainly studies the teaching method of engineering ethics course under the background of general education and summarizes and discusses it accordingly.</p>

Developing Engineering Students’ Moral Reasoning Skills Using Problem-Based Learning

Problem-Based Learning has become an increasingly popular instructional method for a variety of disciplines at all levels. Many studies and meta-analyses of these studies have shown the efficacy of this method for developing knowledge and skills. I adopted this method for teaching Engineering Ethics at Carnegie Mellon University, which has as its main course objectives the development of moral reasoning skills, as well as collaboration and communication skills, with special attention given to ethical dilemmas that may arise in the normal course of an engineer’s professional career. In the most recent iteration of the course, I used the Engineering and Science Issues Test as a pretest and posttest to test the development of my students’ moral reasoning skills over the course of the semester. Based on the results of these tests, I argue that the students in my Engineering Ethics course did in fact significantly develop their moral reasoning skills.

Effects of an Audience Response System for Peer Evaluations of Student Presentations in an Engineering Ethics Course

Engineering Ethics is an example of a subject in which there is no single correct answer. Unlike most other courses in the engineering field, where problems have a unique answer, students need to derive an optimal solution according to the context. For the ethics cource, the objective is being able to apply the ideas in practice in the real world, and this should be more of a focus than being able to understand the specialist terminology and derive model solutions. Group discussions and analysis of past cases are effective ways of cultivating this kind of ethical sense. In this study, we used an audience response system in classes and evaluated the learning benefits. Having students' own responses visualized in real time encourages active learning while still maintaining continuity of instruction. In particular, in the group presentations for ethics case studies, peer evaluations of the presentation techniques as well as the content of the idead presented were used. Having the voting results visualized in real time was useful for encouraging students to take an active interest in listening to the presentations. This was an effective way to encourage students to come to their own conclusions wnile understanding the diverse range of values held by other people.

Why Ideology Matters for Learning: A Case of Ideological Convergence in an Engineering Ethics Classroom Discussion on Drone Warfare

The relationship between ideology and learning remains insufficiently theorized and sparsely investigated in the learning sciences. Drawing on Stuart Hall’s theorization of ideology, Judith Butler’s notion of the (un)grievability of lives, and Sara Ahmed’s construct of stickiness, we illustrate how insights from critical social theory are indispensable to understanding processes of learning and how perspectives from the learning sciences can enrich critical social theory. Through the analysis of a classroom discussion on the use of militarized drones in an undergraduate engineering ethics course, we show how ideological convergence among participants constructed locally significant categories of “civilian,” “terrorist,” and (un)grievability, which narrowed the possible trajectories for students’ disciplinary learning in engineering and engineering ethics. Our analysis also shows that fleeting moments of ideological expansion offered opportunities for new learning; however, most of these instances of possibility were not sustained through the classroom discussion. We explicate how ideological convergences and expansions, as interactional achievements, profoundly matter for disciplinary learning and students’ identities. In conclusion, we explore the implications of our findings for broader contexts of learning and for the field of the learning sciences.

The Development of Empathic Perspective‐Taking in an Engineering Ethics Course

AbstractBackgroundPerspective‐taking, a key component of engineering, is particularly salient in engineering ethics. Yet practices for promoting its development in engineering students both within and outside of ethics education remain largely underexplored.PurposeThe objective of this investigation was twofold: first, we explored the aspects of an engineering ethics course that contributed to changes in perspective‐taking among graduate‐level engineering students. Second, we explored the nature of these changes.Design/MethodWe used Critical Incident Technique to explore these two research objectives. To enhance the rigor of this qualitative investigation, we implemented Walther, Sochacka, and Kellam's Quality Framework.ResultsThe analysis of 24 critical incidents extracted from post‐course interviews resulted in five distinct but related themes representing potential causes of changes in perspective‐taking. Themes included the sharing of diverse perspectives, the challenge of ethical decision‐making, projection exercises, repetitive application of Reflexive Principlism, and experiencing cognitive dissonance. Second, we found four themes representing the nature of perspectivetaking changes, including open‐mindedness, holistic perspective‐taking, principle‐based perspective‐taking, and worldview broadening.ConclusionsThese findings elucidate nuances engineering educators might consider when seeking perspective‐taking development among their students, such as the nature of case study prompts and the relationship between perspective‐taking and ethical reasoning processes.

Problem-Based Learning in Engineering Ethics Courses

I describe the first stages of a process of design research in which I employ problem-based learning in a course in engineering ethics, which fulfills a requirement for students in engineering degree programs. The aim of the course is to foster development of particular cognitive skills contributing to moral imagination, a capacity to notice, respond to, and think about basic values in open-ended problem situations. In the course, groups of students develop their own problem situations based on their experience and expertise in engineering practice, then respond to those situations through a guided process of inquiry and problem solving designed to focus their attention on basic ethical values. I close with observations on the process of designing the course, laying the groundwork for subsequent formal assessment.

Teaching Engineering Ethics to PhD Students: A Berkeley\u2013Delft Initiative

A joint effort by the University of California at Berkeley and Delft University of Technology to develop a graduate engineering ethics course for PhD students encountered two types of challenges: academic and institutional. Academically, long-term collaborative research efforts between engineering and philosophy faculty members might be needed before successful engineering ethics courses can be initiated; the teaching of ethics to engineering graduate students and collaborative research need to go hand-in-hand. Institutionally, both bottom-up approaches at the level of the faculty and as a joint research and teaching effort, and top-down approaches that include recognition by a University’s administration and the top level of education management, are needed for successful and sustainable efforts to teach engineering ethics.

Quantifying the Effects of Using Online Student Response Systems in an Engineering Ethics Course

AbstractMost university students now have access to wireless devices (e.g., smartphones, tablets, or laptops). By using an online student response systems (OSRS), students can use those wireless devices to respond to questions and quizzes posted by the instructor. Those questions may have different styles such as multiple-choice, true/false, and open-ended questions. This paper assesses different effects of implementing OSRS on students’ engagement and performance when taking an engineering ethics course by comparing selected measures of effectiveness of an experimental group of students (where OSRS has been implemented) with those of a control group (where OSRS has not been implemented). It was found that implementing OSRS significantly increased students’ attendance rate and ability to function in a group. However, implementing OSRS in an engineering ethics course was found to have no significant effect on improving students’ performance or their level of achieving the course’s learning outcomes or perf...

RATIONALE AND TEACHING OBJECTIVES FOR A CANADIAN ENGINEERING ETHICS GAME

This paper uses Tyler’s rationale as a framework for analyzing the teaching objectives surrounding the design of a video game to teach Canadian engineering ethics.The two keys challenges in this area are defining what should be taught in engineering ethics and then how it is evaluated in order to demonstrate improved understanding. Traditionally, engineering ethics courses are taught as either codes of conduct, or based on case studies with very constrained courses. The evaluation that follows then uses the Defining Issues Test (DIT) or an instructor’s evaluation.However, the above methods could be improved by focusing on engineering ethics as a situated, embedded, and applied discipline. That is, one in which decisions are made as part of a team, embedded in a workplace whose goals will likely be in conflict with the engineers, and whose outcomes are unknown at the time decisions are made.By using a serious game in which the players are protagonists affords us the opportunity to present thick cases with multiple decision points and opportunities for players to demonstrate their ethical bias. Additionally, the progress of players and their interactions with non-playing characters can reveal information on their assumptions and ethical bias.