This paper describes the motivations and some directions for bringing insights and methods from moral and cultural psychology to bear on how engineering ethics is conceived, taught, and assessed. Therefore, the audience for this paper is not only engineering ethics educators and researchers but also administrators and organizations concerned with ethical behaviors. Engineering ethics has typically been conceived and taught as a branch of professional and applied ethics with pedagogical aims, where students and practitioners learn about professional codes and/or Western ethical theories and then apply these resources to address issues presented in case studies about engineering and/or technology. As a result, accreditation and professional bodies have generally adopted ethical reasoning skills and/or moral knowledge as learning outcomes. However, this paper argues that such frameworks are psychologically “irrealist” and culturally biased: it is not clear that ethical judgments or behaviors are primarily the result of applying principles, or that ethical concerns captured in professional codes or Western ethical theories do or should reflect the engineering ethical concerns of global populations. Individuals from Western educated industrialized rich democratic cultures are outliers on various psychological and social constructs, including self-concepts, thought styles, and ethical concerns. However, engineering is more cross cultural and international than ever before, with engineers and technologies spanning multiple cultures and countries. For instance, different national regulations and cultural values can come into conflict while performing engineering work. Additionally, ethical judgments may also result from intuitions, closer to emotions than reflective thought, and behaviors can be affected by unconscious, social, and environmental factors. To address these issues, this paper surveys work in engineering ethics education and assessment to date, shortcomings within these approaches, and how insights and methods from moral and cultural psychology could be used to improve engineering ethics education and assessment, making them more culturally responsive and psychologically realist at the same time.

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Ethics has long been recognized as crucial to responsible engineering, but the increasingly globalized environments present challenges to effective engineering ethics training. This paper is part of a larger research project that aims to examine the effects of culture and education on ethics training in undergraduate engineering students at universities in the United States, China, and the Netherlands. We are interested in how students’ curricular and extra-curricular (e.g., internships, service projects) experiences and training impact their ethical reasoning and moral dispositions, and how this differs cross-culturally. To understand this, we are conducting mixed methods research longitudinally over four years to engineering students at our participating universities to gauge their moral dispositions and ethical reasoning skills and to measure any change in these. This work-in-progress paper, however, is not about the direct outcomes of this research project. Rather, it critically examines our own practices and methods in doing this research. We begin the paper by briefly introducing the larger research project and motivating the use of comparative, multi-institutional case studies as necessary for contextualizing, complementing, and interpreting quantitative data on ethical reasoning and moral dispositions. Because the conditions related to engineering ethics education differ widely per participating institution for institutional (and also likely cultural) reasons, interpreting and analyzing quantitative survey data will require understanding contextual conditions of education at each institution. Comparative case studies can supply missing contextual information to provide a more complete picture of the engineering ethics educational contexts, strategies, and practices at each of the participating universities. However, in considering how to design and conduct these case studies, we realized we were operating under certain assumptions such as ethics in engineering as separate (and separable from) the “real,” or technical engineering curriculum. These assumptions have been widely problematized in engineering ethics education (Cech, 2014; Tormey et al. 2015; Polmear et al. 2019); they are assumptions that we in our teaching and research attempt to dispel. Our paper considers (and invites discussion on) the broader implications of methodological design in conducting cross-cultural multi-sited case studies in engineering ethics education research. It explores models for designing and conducting our case studies so as not to reproduce pernicious ideas about social and ethical issues in engineering as subsidiary “interventions” in the “actual,” (i.e., technical) curriculum. More generally we discuss how engineering ethics education research methods can be harnessed to overcome this established division.@en

This full research paper develops a framework for using comparative case studies to triangulate with quantitative survey data in engineering ethics education research.Ethics has long been recognized as crucial to responsible engineering, but the increasingly globalized environments of contemporary engineering present challenges to effective engineering ethics training. An overarching goal of our team’s larger project is to examine the effects of culture and education on ethics training in undergraduate engineering students at universities in the United States, China, and the Netherlands to assess how this training impacts students’ ethical reasoning and moral dispositions, and how this differs cross-culturally. To gauge students’ moral dispositions and ethical reasoning skills and to measure any change in these, we administer the Moral Foundations Questionnaire and the Engineering & Science Issues Test to engineering students longitudinally over four years. Because the conditions related to engineering ethics education differ widely per participating institution, interpreting and analyzing survey quantitative data will require understanding the contextual conditions of education at each institution. In this paper we ask the question what and how can case study methods contribute to longitudinal and cross-cultural ethics educational research with large data sets? To answer it, we develop conceptual and methodological foundations for the design of comparative, multi-institutional case studies to contextualize, complement, and interpret quantitative and qualitative data on ethical reasoning and moral dispositions. We develop comparative case studies to supply missing contextual information for triangulation with quantitative and qualitative data and to provide a more complete picture of the engineering ethics educational contexts, strategies, and practices at each of the participating universities. In this project, case studies provide informational and contextual significance to the other sources of data our research produces, elucidating conditions required to understand and make sense of the results of the research. In the paper we introduce our research project, motivate the use of case studies in our research by reviewing literature on case studies and multi-method triangulation in educational research. We explain how specific cases will be designed, and by providing the first step of two cases, timelines of ethics interventions for two degree programs, demonstrate the informational and interpretive need for comparative case studies in triangulating with other data sources. By using multiple case design to compare universities’ approaches in this frame, our analysis can respond to particular institutional educational contexts and cultural and language factors, make cross-cultural comparisons, and offer recommendations about responsible and culturally responsive engineering ethics education.@en