How do undergraduate students in engineering conceive of themselves as professionals? How can a course on engineering ethics affect the development of an undergraduate student's professional identity? In this project, students responded to questions about the characteristics and responsibilities of professional engineers. The results indicate that students learn about professionalism primarily from relatives and co-workers who are engineers, and rarely from technical engineering courses. Even before they study engineering ethics, students put honesty and integrity on par with technical competence as an essential characteristic of engineers. In the course, students benefit from cases of actual incidents and from classroom activities that encourage diverse perspectives on moral problems. By analyzing cases in groups and by hearing different perspectives, students build self-confidence in moral reasoning. By the end of the course, some students understand professional responsibility not only as liability for blame but in a capacious sense as stewardship for society.
A concept inventory is a standardized assessment tool intended to evaluate a student's understanding of the core concepts of a topic. In order to create a concept inventory it is necessary to accurately identify these core concepts. A Delphi process is a structured multi-step process that uses a group of experts to achieve a consensus opinion. We present the results of three Delphi processes to identify topics that are important and difficult in each of three introductory computing subjects: discrete mathematics, programming fundamentals, and logic design. The topic rankings can not only be used to guide the coverage of concept inventories, but can also be used by instructors to identify what topics merit special attention.
A Delphi process is a structured multi-step process that uses a group of experts to achieve a consensus opinion. We present the results of three Delphi processes to identify topics that are important and difficult in each of three introductory computing subjects: discrete math, programming fundamentals, and logic design. The topic rankings can be used to guide both the coverage of student learning assessments (i.e., concept inventories) and can be used by instructors to identify what topics merit emphasis.
We describe the development, testing, and formative evaluation of nine role-play scenarios for teaching central topics in the responsible conduct of research to graduate students in science and engineering. In response to formative evaluation surveys, students reported that the role-plays were more engaging and promoted deeper understanding than a lecture or case study covering the same topic. In the future, summative evaluations will test whether students display this deeper understanding and retain the lessons of the role-play experience.
As the research integrity officer at my university for two yearsSince antiquity, writers and artists have borrowed words, images, and ideas from predecessors without attribution. The acceptability of borrowing has varied throughout history and across cultures, but academics in the West have generally taken a strict attitude toward plagiarism.2 In the academy today, plagiarism is wrong because it is the misrepresentation of the ideas and words of someone else as one's own. By omitting citations, the plagiarist impedes scholarship by preventing readers from tracing
Recent research in ethics education shows a potentially problematic variation in content, curricular materials, and instruction. While ethics instruction is now widespread, studies have identified significant variation in both the goals and methods of ethics education, leaving researchers to conclude that many approaches may be inappropriately paired with goals that are unachievable. This paper speaks to these concerns by demonstrating the importance of aligning classroom-based assessments to clear ethical learning objectives in order to help students and instructors track their progress toward meeting those objectives. Two studies at two different universities demonstrate the usefulness of classroom-based, formative assessments for improving the quality of students' case responses in computational modeling and research ethics.
Abstract. We give a clear exposition of the algorithm of Micali and Vazirani for computing a maximum matching in a general graph. This is the most efficient algorithm known for general matching.On a graph with n vertices and m edges this algorithm runs in O(ni/2m) time.
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