RUI: Research Initiation: Investigating the impact of the liberal arts on the ethical development of engineers.

Ethical reasoning is essential to the engineering profession and is well-recognized by governing professional societies and accrediting bodies. For example, an engineer must balance the need to increase profitability with public safety when designing a new product. Liberal arts institutions are arguably well-positioned to promote the ethical development of engineering students and to incorporate the development of students’ ethical reasoning as an essential curriculum goal, given their focus on a broad and interdisciplinary education of the whole person.

The role of engineers has undergone considerable advancements since our society’s industrialization, moving from a primary responsibility to the employer to a profession that holds the safety and health of the public as paramount. Recently, an emphasis on sustainability in considering the effects on future generations and the inherent value of the environment has arisen in engineering ethics.

Engineering students should be able to identify not only the immediate impacts of their work but also the indirect, unintended, and future consequences. This project is aligned with the goals of the PFE: Research Initiation in Engineering Formation (PFE: RIEF) program and will enable engineering programs and educators to better prepare engineering undergraduates beyond the technical curriculum and advance engineering ethics education.

This project will initiate research into the complex network of factors predominantly associated with a liberal arts education that promotes ethical development. It will establish a framework that combines quantitative and qualitative methods to guide future studies and develop the project investigators' abilities to conduct educational research.

The overall project objectives will be to develop the educational research capabilities of the PI, an engineering faculty member new to educational research, and to gather exploratory data on ethical development using survey instruments and available institutional data at Doane University. The PI will be supported by an experienced team consisting of a Co-PI and interdisciplinary faculty mentors to investigate the impact of the liberal arts on the ethical formation of engineers.

The research objective of the proposed project is to gather exploratory data on ethical development using survey instruments and available institutional data at Doane University. The research will seek to determine (1) what components of a liberal arts education contribute to the ethical development of engineering undergraduates and (2) how the ethical development of engineering undergraduates compares to other students at the same institution.

These questions will be investigated using a longitudinal mixed methods approach that includes pre- and mid-college Defining Issues Test 2 (DIT2) survey data for pairwise statistical analysis, institutional data on college contexts and student characteristics, and a qualitative survey used to develop explanatory theories in sequence with the quantitative data. This research will advance the current knowledge base concerning (1) the underlying, specific factors related to ethical development associated with a liberal arts education beyond the gross institutional type of previous research and (2) the impact of the liberal arts specific to the ethical development of professions like engineering.

Recommendations on curriculum elements will be made to promote ethical reasoning development in engineering students. It will also create a novel framework for future studies of student ethical development in undergraduate institutions.

This project is jointly funded by Engineering Education & Centers (EEC) and the Established Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (EPSCoR).

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.