Formal Ethics and Social Impact Training and Instruction’s Influence on Undergraduate Engineering Students

open_access
Open Access
Author:
Fox, Mc Kenna
Area of Honors:
Biological Engineering
Degree:
Bachelor of Science
Document Type:
Thesis
Thesis Supervisors:
Christine Costello, Thesis Supervisor
Heather Elise Preisendanz, Thesis Honors Advisor
Keywords:
engineering ethics
engineering education
engineering
self-assessment surveys
ethics and social impacts
Abstract:
Engineering is a career which has an express purpose to benefit the public. To ensure the protection and safety of the public, technical schools, universities, and colleges have course requirements to prepare students for their careers. The learning outcomes of these courses have been outlined by the Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology (ABET). Education and training in ethics and social impacts (ESI) have increased in the last twenty-five years since the implementation of ABET EC2000, which changes their previous criterion to include more outcome-based evaluation to programs under their accreditation (Barry & Ohland, 2011). To better understand how ESI impacts students’ comfort with tackling ethical issues and the impact of their work, universities have been conducting research and surveying students using various methods. In this study, biological engineering undergraduate students and agricultural and biorenewable systems management undergraduate students were surveyed before formal instruction for ESI and post-instruction to see if undergraduate students’ answers to self-reflection surveys indicate how much their formal curricular experiences, co-curricular experiences, and perceived importance of ESI influenced their ESI development. The analysis of short-response answers and ranked questions will follow a modified method of the SEED survey conducted by Finelli et. al., (2012). After conducting a Wilcoxon Rank-Sum Test, students’ responses to Likert questions probing for comfort in using ESI in decision-making statistically significant increases were found (p-value< 0.05). Students were more knowledgeable on ethical frameworks, using them in definitions, after formal ESI instruction. Findings from this study encourage the continued research of students’ reflections of ESI instruction.