Enhancing engineering students' ethical reasoning: Situating reflexive principlism within the SIRA framework

Abstract

Background: Educating engineers to reason through the ethical decisions they encounter when developing or implementing new technologies is a critical challenge. However, engineering educators have not widely adopted a framework for preparing engineering students to analyze ethical issues. Purpose/Hypothesis: We developed and tested an approach for enhancing the ethical reasoning of engineering students. This approach integrates reflexive principlism, an ethical reasoning approach, within a structured learning framework, scaffolded, interactive, and reflective analysis, or SIRA. We hypothesized that students' ethical reasoning abilities and empathic perspective-taking tendencies would increase. Design/Method: We implemented and tested the integrated approach over five semesters with graduate-level engineering students through a quasi-experimental, controlled research design. We measured changes in ethical reasoning using the Engineering Ethical Reasoning Instrument (EERI) and the Defining Issues Test 2 (DIT2) and empathic tendencies using the Interpersonal Reactivity Index (IRI). We examined relationships among measures through correlation analysis. Results: The EERI instrumentation indicated that the approach significantly increased the ethical reasoning abilities of graduate-level engineering students. However, the DIT2 findings did not indicate change. The IRI indicated perspective-taking tendencies were enhanced and personal distress tendencies were reduced. Postcourse correlational data indicated moderate relationships between perspective-taking and ethical reasoning as measured by the IRI and the EERI indexes. Conclusions: This study provides a theoretical approach for developing ethical reasoning and empathic perspective-taking among graduate-level engineering students. It also provides a theoretical framework, a pedagogical approach, and evaluation methods that others may utilize. K E Y W O R D S critical reflection, ethics, ethical reasoning, instructional methods, reflexive principlism

Understanding ethical decision‐making in design

“…To examine students' ethical decision-making, we draw on Beever and Brightman's (2016) framework of reflexive principlism, an emerging heuristic for engineering ethics (e.g., Hess, Beever, Zoltowski, Kisselburgh, & Brightman, 2019). We use this approach for two reasons.…”

Analysis of How Capstone Teams Define Engineering Design Failure

“…For example, just identifying the societal needs and concerns can get very complicated as these perspectives are very much dependent on the perspective of the person analyzing or describing a given situation [3,4]. Additionally, the continued rapid change and growth of advancements in science and technology, continuously present challenging situations to engineers related to ethics and values [5]. There is not enough research yet to understand how engineering students engage in the ethicaldecision making, hence the solutions are not very developed yet [6].…”

Using Qualitative Data to Further Examine Flagged Items from the Engineering Ethics Reasoning Instrument (EERI)

“…In contrast, the EERI has been referenced or used on a regular basis since being introduced initially in 2013 [4] and in its current form again in 2014 [8]. Although it has primarily been seen in conference proceedings [1][4] [8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17], it was recently used in at least one journal publication [18]. Given the EERI's continued use, concern regarding how thoroughly it has been validated has led to recent investigations, such as the PCFA [1] leading to this current follow-up.…”