| NSF Org: |
SES Division of Social and Economic Sciences |
| Recipient: |
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| Initial Amendment Date: | July 27, 2016 |
| Latest Amendment Date: | August 3, 2021 |
| Award Number: | 1635887 |
| Award Instrument: | Standard Grant |
| Program Manager: |
Wenda K. Bauchspies
wbauchsp@nsf.gov (703)292-5034 SES Division of Social and Economic Sciences SBE Directorate for Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences |
| Start Date: | August 1, 2016 |
| End Date: | July 31, 2022 (Estimated) |
| Total Intended Award Amount: | $350,000.00 |
| Total Awarded Amount to Date: | $350,000.00 |
| Funds Obligated to Date: |
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| History of Investigator: |
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| Recipient Sponsored Research Office: |
110 8TH ST TROY NY US 12180-3590 (518)276-6000 |
| Sponsor Congressional District: |
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| Primary Place of Performance: |
110 Eighth Street Troy NY US 12180-3522 |
| Primary Place of
Performance Congressional District: |
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| Unique Entity Identifier (UEI): |
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| Parent UEI: |
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| NSF Program(s): | Cultivating Cultures of Ethica |
| Primary Program Source: |
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| Program Reference Code(s): |
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| Program Element Code(s): |
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| Award Agency Code: | 4900 |
| Fund Agency Code: | 4900 |
| Assistance Listing Number(s): | 47.075 |
ABSTRACT
This project seeks to provide insights contributing to the cultivation of ethical educational cultures in engineering. It investigates engineering students' educational experiences, both formal and informal, to provide a holistic understanding of how students' varied experiences influence the nature and degree of their ethical engagement. The project asks: What configuration of experiences do engineering students identify as conducive to or contradicting the development, support, and enforcement of an ethical culture within the context of their education and beyond? To answer that question, the investigation focuses on how students make meaning surrounding questions of ethics spanning the domains of personal, professional, and social responsibilities. While many instructors of engineering students are committed to teaching ethics, and while many scholars of engineering education have studied which modalities of ethics education result in the greatest learning, there has been little research into how students interpret ethics - in terms of either abstract knowledge or actual practices and behaviors - or how formal and informal educational dimensions come together to provide an integrated experience for students. The findings of this research will aid engineering educators and educational policy makers implement interventions that positively impact students' overall educational experience, potentially leading both to more ethical practices and to a higher level of student engagement. Together, these outcomes could transform the career preparation of engineers and prepare engineering students better for the ethical complexities of contemporary professional engineering work.
The primary research goals of the project are threefold: 1) To track diverse students' evolving understandings of the roles and places of ethics within their overall educational experience; 2) To identify the salient dimensions and primary mechanisms of their educational experience that shape these understandings; and 3) To characterize the overall educational cultural landscape at one institution by highlighting the range of students' experiences as they attempt to align their individual identities with input from their social networks, input from their instructors and advisors, and institutional educational structures. The project will use a mixed-methods approach blending qualitative analysis of data gathered through interviews, focus groups, and direct observation with quantitative analysis of data gathered via extensive student surveys. The qualitative analysis will orient the project by identifying patterns of cultural practice and meaning making based on students' own conceptions, using their own language, and relating different dimensions of ethical values and practices according to their own conceptual schemas. Findings from the analysis of qualitative data will be used to design survey instruments that probe the student body broadly on the variables of most significance. Data gathering will be focused on one cohort of students as they move through the entire educational cycle, with limited supplementary data gathered on cohorts above and/or below the targeted group. The work is poised to contribute to the literature on engineering ethics education by drawing together three broad domains of related scholarship: 1) Work on ethics instruction combining micro and macro-ethical approaches; 2) Work on engineering epistemologies and their role in shaping educational cultures; and 3) Deep ethnographies of engineering practices, including in educational contexts.
PROJECT OUTCOMES REPORT
Disclaimer
This Project Outcomes Report for the General Public is displayed verbatim as submitted by the Principal Investigator (PI) for this award. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this Report are those of the PI and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation; NSF has not approved or endorsed its content.
NSF CCE STEM 1635887
Standard: Ethics Education as Enculturation: Formal and informal mechanisms of engineering student learning of personal, social, and professional responsibility
This project involved 1) Intensive qualitative data gathering via interviews, focus groups, and direct observation and data analysis to identify the most salient factors in determining the likelihood that a sense of individual and collective ethics would be cultivated in enineering education at the nation's oldest engineering school, Rensselaer Polytehnic Institute. The project defined the "culture of ethics" boradly, allowing for engineering students to voice their perspectives and articulate the meanin gof "ethics" in their own terms. Date was collected in two time periods--the intial period of the grant, which occurred in 2017-2018 well before the COVID-19 pandemic, and during the pandemic via new social media Discord servers necessitated by the pandemic circumstances underway once the grant was reactivated. Personnel were different in these two periods due to insitutional departures and student graduations.Considerable qualitative data in the form of interviews was gatehred and archived. Most of the students interviewed in 2017-2018 were re-interviewed in the second period, but an additional dataset was added in 2021-2022. This we have two data sets nearly five years apart, one of few such studies to have a longitudinal timeframe.
Different dimensions of ethics were covered in the project, namely personal, professional, and social responsibilities. Interviews explored how interviewees differentiated among these, and the relative salience of each domain in terms of their educational experience concerning the social impacts of engineering as a profession. The second round of interviews took place over online tools such as Zoom, WebEx, Discord, and various chat platforms. We asked current and former RPI engineering students how they view ethics and ethical considerations in their education, what their current understandings of ethics were, and how COVID-19 had changed how they view ethical considerations. We asked previous interviewees from the 21 interviews of the earlier project how their views on ethics had changed over time since the initial interviews. How had their views on ethics in engineering changed over the past 4 years? What were the major changes and events that had shifted or remained central to their view of engineering ethics? Had experience in industry, including jobs and internships, affected the way they view ethics?
In order to cultivate ethical cultures in engineering at Rensselaer, our findings indicate that ethics must be explicitly addressed as part of the engineering curriculum--rather than in humanities courses, which are perceived as tangential to engineering education. Many interviewees reported that ethics were devalued in their engineering curriculum, reporting that engineering faculty referred to ethics only tangentially and devoted little time to ethics in core engineering courses. This result indicates how much room for improvement there is for the inclusion of ethics education in engineering education.
Last Modified: 01/10/2023
Modified by: Nancy D Campbell
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