This research-to-practice full paper presents a series of brief engineering ethics case studies, all inspired by actual incidents recounted during interviews with early career engineers. Current ABET accreditation requirements include ethics-related outcomes for engineering graduates, and most engineering professional societies and employers maintain their own ethics codes. Yet we have limited knowledge about what kinds of ethical situations and issues are faced by practicing engineers, both in general and during early career phases. More nuanced understandings about the ethical dimensions of engineering work could inform training interventions designed to better prepare engineering graduates for workplace realities. This paper aims to bridge research and practice by presenting a series of brief case studies covering a variety of ethical situations encountered by early career engineers. The case studies are adapted from interviews conducted with a stratified sample of 29 technical professionals, all with at least one degree in engineering and 1–3 years of full-time work experience. The interviews were carried out as part of a larger mixed-methods research study investigating how engineering students and early career professionals perceive and experience ethics, social responsibility, and related concerns. The case studies presented in this paper were intentionally selected and developed to reflect different job roles and industry settings, as well as diverse ethical issues encountered by our participants. We present cases that reflect more commonplace or everyday situations that are “microethical” in nature, i.e., involving localized interactions among individual professionals. We also include some suggested scaffolds and resources for instructors seeking to use such cases in their teaching. We intend that this paper will be relevant and useful for instructors who want to bring early career ethics cases into their courses, as well as for those wishing to write short ethics case studies.

In this innovative practice work-in-progress paper, enrollment data from five institutions was used to examine equity in undergraduate research through Vertically Integrated Projects (VIP) Programs. VIP is a model for undergraduate research in which large student teams are embedded in faculty-driven projects. The American Association of Colleges and Universities recognizes undergraduate research as a high-impact experience, associated with higher graduation rates and greater learning gains in college. Participation in multiple high-impact experiences yields cumulative gains to students from all backgrounds, and compensatory gains for minoritized and marginalized students. Nationally however, minoritized students, first-generation college students, and transfer students participate in undergraduate research at lower rates than their peers. In this study, VIP enrollments at five institutions (N = 6,651 over two semesters) were compared to demographics of the institutions to determine the degree to which programs achieved equity among historically underserved minorities, transfer students, first-generation college students, and by gender. Analysis accounted for demographics and level of participation of the academic units involved, comparing enrollments with what would be expected under equitable enrollment. Analyses were done for each institution and across the pooled sample. By institution, equity across categories varied. Across the pooled sample, results show small effects sizes for status as a historically underserved minority, very small effect sizes for first-generation students and transfer students, and slightly higher participation among women than men. The large-scale nature of VIP teams enables institutions to scale-up their undergraduate research offerings. This paper begins answering the question of whether this scaling increases access for marginalized populations, and the results are encouraging. The paper is a work-in-progress, because data needs to be collected from more VIP institutions for a wider-ranging study. The chisquare test and the importance of using effect sizes in interpreting results will be explained, so others can apply the same method. Results, implications, and next steps are discussed.

This paper uses the critical incident technique to analyze how early career engineers experience ethics in the workplace. Our results build off a previously developed framework that categorizes critical incidents related to professional engineering ethics, but we expand the framework to address its gaps. Though there was significant overlap between our findings and the existing framework in the types of critical incidents reported by participants, in some cases the severity of a negative ethical experience was not captured by existing categories, especially when describing sexual harassment in the workplace. Many incidents also required multiple categories to accurately describe them as opposed to a single overarching descriptor. Additionally, we observed a connection between personal morality and professional ethics that was present in some critical incidents. Our observations suggest that similar types of critical incidents related to ethics may often be experienced by engineers, but more work needs to be done to expand the classification of these situations and better understand how engineers develop ethics-related competencies, especially early in their careers and in a workplace context.

This Innovative Practice, Work in Progress paper examines first-year student perceptions and learning outcomes in an experiential learning program. The Vertically Integrated Projects (VIP) model affords students an opportunity to earn academic credit by working on teams while contributing to faculty-led research and design projects. The real-world context of the VIP projects facilitates student engagement in projects that address Grand Challenges. As part of the innovative model of our VIP Program at Purdue University, we have incorporated student self-reflection of their progress on each of the seven ABET outcomes as part of the student assessment. The VIP model was recently expanded as a pathway for first-year students at our institution, which requires all engineering students to complete a first-year program. This work addresses the ways in which first-year students participating in VIP address Grand Challenges and explores the ways in which these students meet ABET outcomes using the following research questions: 1) How are first-year VIP students reflecting on ABET outcomes? 2) How does participation in VIP affect first-year students’ interest, self-efficacy, and sense of belonging in engineering? The study uses a mixed methods approach, triangulating qualitative and quantitative student evaluation data from Fall 2020 – Fall 2021. Survey results indicate that VIP participation has a positive effect on student perception of engineering, and, although they may not address all ABET outcomes as first-year students, students effectively connected their project work with specific outcomes. By understanding how VIP and, more generally, experiential learning affects first-year students’ perceptions and connection to ABET outcomes, educators can adopt this model and strengthen student experiences from the beginning.

This Work-in-Progress Research paper describes (1) the contemporary research space on ethics education in engineering; (2) our long-term research plan; (3) the theoretical underpinnings of Phase 1 of our research plan (phenomenography); and (4) the design and developmental process of a phenomenographic interview protocol to explore engineers' experiences with ethics. Ethical behavior is a complex phenomenon that is complicated by the institutional and cultural contexts in which it occurs. Engineers also have varied roles and often work in a myriad of capacities that influence their experiences with and understanding of ethics in practice. We are using phenomenography, a qualitative research approach, to explore and categorize the ways engineers experience and understand ethical engineering practice. Specifically, phenomenography will allow us to systematically investigate the range and complexity of ways that engineers experience ethics in professional practice in the health products industry. Phenomenographic data will be obtained through a specialized type of semi-structured interview. Here we introduce the design of our interview protocol and its four sections: Background, Experience, Conceptual, and Summative. We also describe our iterative process for framing questions throughout each section.

This Research Work in Progress Paper explores the identities of women engineers within the EPICS Program at Purdue University. This study builds on previous research on engineering cultures and identities in which women often have to minimize or alter feminine aspects of their identities in order to fit in and be perceived as competent. However, engineering service-learning contexts have an opportunity to provide an environment that challenges traditional engineering cultures, values, and identities with its focus on societal impact and integration of human-centered design processes. Furthermore, service-learning programs like EPICS and community-driven organizations like Engineers Without Borders (EWB) are typically more gender-balanced in contrast to significant underrepresentation of women in traditional disciplines like electrical and mechanical engineering. Empirical research is needed to determine the role of gender in such engineering contexts that may hinder or aid expressions of gender and identity. Using an ethnographic case study approach to examine video-recorded observations and in-depth interviews, we explore the social identities of three women engineers within the EPICS engineering service learning program. In this work-in-progress paper, we provide a brief summary of the literature related to engineering culture and identity, and describe the engineering service-learning context, methods and preliminary findings of the study, as well as directions for future research.

In this Research Full Paper, we investigate moral disengagement among first-year engineering students. Current engineering ethics education typically assumes that providing information about what is ethical (i.e., as explicated in ethical codes) and developing ethical reasoning skills will lead to ethical behaviors in the classroom and on the job. However, we know that people, including students and practicing engineers, sometimes engage in unethical conduct. Bandura's theory of moral disengagement explains how people disengage from their ethical principles and behave unethically. In this paper, we investigate and characterize moral disengagement among first-year engineering students. This study is based on survey and interview data collected from first-year engineering students at four U.S. universities as part of a larger longitudinal, mixed-methods research project. Our survey sample showed similar or lower moral disengagement scores as compared to other studies, while our interview data revealed how different students applied different ethical frames when evaluating moral situations and/or making moral decisions. Moreover, seven of the eight types of moral disengagement measured by the survey instrument were evident in our interview data, and we propose another mechanism called unreflective disengagement. We expect our study will be of interest to researchers and engineering educators who wish to better understand moral disengagement among students, including as a potentially relevant factor in ongoing efforts to enhance engineering ethics training.

This Research Work-in-Progress paper builds on previous literature related to the professional formation of engineers and issues pertaining to diversity and inclusion within engineering though a comparative analysis of two different disciplines. These issues are complex, interrelated and challenging to untangle, and thus require innovative strategies to explore them. Our larger study utilizes design thinking with an embedded mixed-methods research approach to investigate foundational understandings of professional formation and diversity and inclusion in engineering. Herein, we describe preliminary findings from co-design sessions we conducted in Biomedical Engineering (BME) and Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) at Purdue University. We compare the design solutions generated by stakeholders and discuss insights regarding the unique contexts and needs of each program, as well as the impacts of the different activities and contexts of the design sessions themselves.

Phenomenography has been increasingly used to explore important questions and complex phenomena in engineering education. However, as a relatively new research method (it was introduced in 1981) with unique and nuanced methodological underpinnings, it is not always well understood. In this special session, we will provide an overview of phenomenography methodology. In addition, participants will gain experience in conducting phenomenographic analysis and interacting with real data. Finally, participants will discuss implications of phenomenographic analysis and potential applications in their teaching and research activities.

This study contributes to our understanding of the social and communication processes that affect students' engagement in design work. We examine ethical considerations in a multidisciplinary design projects as students work through the challenges of team collaboration and struggle to integrate the ethical and technical aspects of engineering work. We use a mixed methods approach to investigate how design teams come to understand and create meanings for ethics in their projects, as well as the social mechanisms by which these students incorporate the diverse kinds of expertise of their team members throughout the course of their design work. In this work-in-progress paper, we will present preliminary results of an analyses of three data points across two semesters. This approach to ethics in engineering design can illuminate the social relations that influence design work and enable or hinder students to effectively recognize and incorporate ethics in their everyday work.

This special session invites academic researchers to temporarily adopt the commitments of interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA) in order to gain insight into psychological experiences in engineering education research. In this session, we will introduce participants to IPA as a methodology that is committed to understanding the lived experience of particular phenomenon while also recognizing that the researcher plays an interpretive role in generating such understanding. The participants will gain an introduction to doing IPA to systematically interpret a transcript through multiple iterations of understanding a text. This experiential learning session will be vibrant with focused activities of conducting qualitative analysis and reflecting on the process. Additionally, we will connect the intentional, analytic processes that are practiced to more holistic principles related to quality in interpretive engineering education research. The expected outcome of this session is that participants will have a robust foundation to begin or advance their inquiries using IPA or other forms of qualitative research.

Engineering remains challenged with regard to underrepresentation by gender and ethnicity. Lack of gender parity in engineering has been a problem since the very start of engineering but conversations about and efforts to address the lack of women in engineering has grown in momentum over the past 30 years. The problem is not only that gender disparity exists, but also an inability to make significant progress in closing the gap over time on a national level. This lack of change suggests that new approaches to understanding the complex problem of underrepresentation of women are needed. Research has advanced our understanding of what can attract women to engineering and retain them within the field. This paper presents data from a service-learning program that aligns pedagogically with the literature on gender and diversity more broadly. Specifically a first-year learning community of 120 students that was 54% female is examined to provide the student perspective. 77% percent of the women cited gaining experience in engineering as a motivation for selecting the learning community. 55% of the women cited the opportunity to impact others with 42% combining the two. Sample comments and quotes from the male and female students are presented and discussed.

Community Engagement or Service-learning is a rapidly growing pedagogy in higher education and has come under increased visibility within engineering and computing education. It has been cited as a potential tool for increasing student engagement as well as diversity among our engineering, technology and computing student bodies. It also has opportunities to prepare the next generation of professionals, addressing issues including retention, diversity, learning and professional preparation. This workshop will introduce interested faculty, students, administrators and professionals to service-learning models including EPICS and provide resources for participants to implement such programs at their respective institutions.

Engineering design is understood to be a social activity, and requires collaboration and negotiation with diverse groups of people. Group communication literature suggests that team member interactions and communication have a major impact on a team's decision-making abilities. Furthermore, these interactions and decision-making processes are impacted by the diversity makeup of the team. In this study, we examine the ways in which communication and social processes relate to ethical issues and decisions, which we envision as interwoven throughout the design process and arise on a day-to-day basis in engineering design. Thus, this work-in-progress paper describes preliminary results about how diversity and ethics interact within engineering design contexts through the use of social network analysis.

Significant efforts have been made to increase the number and diversity of students in pathways to engineering careers. This paper describes an effort to address these goals by adapting EPICS, a nationally recognized project-based, service-learning university program, to the high school and middle school environments. Preliminary data from 60 high schools in 11 states with over 2,200 students indicate that this program is having an impact on students' interest in and their views of engineering. However, students' academic and career choices are influenced by a number of factors. Building on previous research investigating pathways into and through engineering, we are beginning a study to explore pre-university students' experiences in our program and how they impact pathways into engineering using a mixed-methods approach grounded in Social Cognitive Career Theory. As an initial step, we have developed a survey, which can be given to students before and after they participate in the program, in order to determine changes in their self-efficacy, outcome expectations, and personal interest. In this work-in-progress paper, we describe the instrument development and data analysis processes. At the conference, we will present preliminary analyses of the pilot tests.

In engineering ethics, the traditional approach views engineers as individual moral agents who are capable of making autonomous decisions. However, the broader context in which engineers work and make their ethical decisions is often overlooked. In teaching engineering students, institutional climates help define how educational programs, curricula, and pedagogical modules are designed with some values and beliefs prioritized over others. The purpose of this research was to investigate if and how institutional climate shapes the ways in which students prioritize ethical values when making ethical decisions. In doing so, we conducted a mixed-method study across four project-based engineering design programs at four different universities. Our quantitative and qualitative results revealed that institutional climate shaped the ways in which students defined, prioritized, and solved ethical problems. Students' differences in ethical reasoning across institutions may reflect the different orientations of each of the programs, such as a focus on entrepreneurialism, marketable products, or human-centered projects. This paper concludes with recommendations for effectively teaching ethical reasoning skills in the context of project-based design teams. By reflecting on institutional climate, engineering educators have to ask themselves what values are highlighted explicitly while others are overlooked in teaching ethics to students. Administrators could explore opportunities for reforming institutional climate to broaden their students' notions about ongoing ethical dilemmas beyond the priorities and valued embedded in their particular programs.

This work in progress paper presents initial results on the development and testing of a novel assessment tool utilizing an ethics transfer case methodology targeted at measuring the ethical reasoning ability of engineering students employing reflexive principlism. This work evaluates the reliability and transferability of a rubric-based assessment of students' responses to a transfer case study employed at Purdue University in the Spring of 2014. The scoring rubric was developed to assess students' ability to apply the reasoning components of reflexive principlism including: (a) identification, (b) specification, (c) empathie perspective-taking, (d) justification, and (e) reflectivity. To determine reliability of the scoring rubric, two raters independently scored 19 students' pre-course responses through 3 iterations of the rubric's development, until 85% overall inter-rater agreement was reached. Two additional scorers, normed on the coding framework, then provided feedback on wording and applied the rubric to the same 19 student responses. Initial results from this analysis and discussion of the assessment tool are presented.

This paper details the transition of one researcher in his journey from attending to the methods of research to identifying and enacting the methodology of interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA). In the backdrop of this paper is a larger qualitative study that is employing IPA to understand a rich picture of how engineering student become engineers, particularly by attending to the fuzzy boundaries between technical and social features of this identity. To ground the discussion of the paper, we draw on a transcript from a single interview in this study conducted with Kevin, a graduating mechanical engineer. We transparently share a reflexive account of conducting IPA research in order to introduce IPA as an excellent research tool for open areas of engineering education research. Further, our goals are to instill confidence in novice qualitative researchers as they embark on the arduous but rewarding path of conducting engineering education research using qualitative methods.

Empathie perspective-taking is central to human-centered, universal, user-centered, and participatory design approaches, as well as ethical reasoning. Designers and users have significant somatic (sensory, proprioceptive, and kinesthetic) knowledge about problems of technology utilization. However, engineering students are not currently taught to access, understand, or value this somatic knowledge in problem-solving processes such as design and ethics. To address this need, we are incorporating a series of developmentally-oriented experiences in enhanced somatosensory awareness adapted from somatics and performing arts into two short courses in the Summer of 2014. Both courses involve assistive technology design projects with community partners of differently-abled clients, but one is located internationally and the other domestically. We will utilize multiple measures of empathie perspective-taking in the context of engineering design and ethical reasoning before and after the courses to assess change. We believe this novel application of practices of somatic learning in the technical field of engineering design and ethical analysis will yield new insights into empathie perspective-taking. This work in progress paper describes our design, application, and testing of these somatosensory awareness practices in both an international and local context. At the conference we will present results from the completed study.

Community Engagement or Service-learning is a rapidly growing pedagogy in higher education and has come under increased visibility within engineering and computing education. It has been cited as a potential tool for increasing student engagement as well as diversity among our engineering, technology and computing student bodies. It also has opportunities to prepare the next generation of professionals, addressing issues including retention, diversity, learning and professional preparation. This workshop will introduce interested faculty, students, administrators and professionals to service-learning models including EPICS and provide resources for participants to implement such programs at their respective institutions.

Community engagement is a pedagogy that integrates engagement with a community, local or global, with academic content. In engineering and computer science the engagement is often the design, delivery and support of projects for NGO's, human service agencies, educational institutions and governmental agencies. Community engagement has been supported in the literature for enhancing learning and motivation. It has been shown to influence retention and interest in engineering and computing, in particular among underrepresented population. Community engagement has been classified in the U.S. under a broader umbrella as "Learning Through Service" (LTS) experiences, which encompass a broad set of engagement activities with a goal of achieving academic learning outcomes that range from volunteerism to service-learning. One successful LTS model is the EPICS program, which has been implemented in over 30 universities. Most programs have been successful, however, some have not. Using a framework of complex change, this paper describes how the program has been institutionalized at the original university and the approaches used to disseminate the model to other institutions to identify key elements of program dissemination.

Engineering is becoming an increasingly global profession, requiring interaction with diverse sets of people from different countries, cultures, and traditions. This diversity introduces more social and ethical complexity to the profession and highlights the importance of enabling engineers to work collaboratively and develop strong ethical decision-making skills. This study examines the relationship between cultural differences and students' individual ethical decision-making and reasoning skills. We conducted this study across four universities with distinct project-based multidisciplinary engineering programs. We developed an instrument for assessing individual ethical reasoning based on a neo-Kohlbergian framework as part of a larger project. This study employs a mixed methods approach to investigate the ways cultural differences in this instrument might affect findings. We conducted statistical tests to examine how the instrument performs across different cultural factors of primary language, ethnicity, and gender. In addition to administering the instrument, we conducted semi-structured interviews with students from all four programs to probe how they understand and handle ethics in the context of their project teams, as well as how cultural differences may play in to these perceptions. This study contributes to our understanding of the cultural perspectives embedded in participants' discourses and reasoning about engineering ethics in general and ethical decision-making processes in engineering project teams.

The motivation of the special session was to allow engineering educators and researchers to explore different cultural perspectives of engineering ethics, and understand how that would affect both individual and team ethical decision-making. This will inform how we teach and assess engineering ethics, especially in diverse project teams, and equip educators with tools for using these instruments as part of the student learning. The special session format will allow for discussion and debate on the appropriateness for diverse student teams.

Prior research has demonstrated that traditional academic pathways tend to provide engineering students with a predominantly technical sense of professional identity. We respond to this research by investigating how a non-traditional pathway, marked by a large service-learning program, engenders a sense of engineering identity. We approach this investigation using a thematic analysis and are currently developing themes related to how alumni/ae of this program construct their engineering selves. We are currently in the early stages of analysis and will present the elaborated themes at the conference.

Each year thousands of new engineers join the workforce and face novel issues raised by radical technological advances. Concurrently, changing societal responses to new technologies introduce novel conflicts in research and development that challenge the scope of established professional codes of ethics. These issues create a critical demand for new approaches for developing moral reasoning for ethical decision-making. Our multidisciplinary team of engineering, communication, and ethics educators has developed and tested a novel pedagogical framework of Scaffolded, Integrated, and Reflexive Analysis (SIRA) of ethics cases to enhance development of moral reasoning that extends beyond case-based analyses. Implemented as a series of two-week cyber-enabled learning modules, with cases from several engineering disciplines, this theory-based, data-driven, cyber-enabled framework for ethics education has applicability across a broad spectrum of disciplines and provides engineering educators with limited ethics training a tested framework and set of resources and modules to adapt and use in their own disciplines. In this paper, we discuss our work in progress on the SIRA framework, its implementation, and our assessment of changes in moral reasoning and student satisfaction when utilizing this model.

This paper represents an update of a three stage research project that culminates in investigating the impact of the service-learning pedagogy on students understanding of human-centered design. The first two stages of the project were disseminated in previously published papers where we discussed the discovery of distinct ways in which students experience human-centered design, along with another published paper discussing the development of an assessment task that would expose and capture students' understanding of human-centered design.

Professional associations of engineering have recommended Service Learning environments to cultivate professional engineering skills. However, a report from ASEE published in 2012 showed that faculty did not consider these learning environments to be important. This study aims to understand the motivation of instructors of Service-Learning programs in engineering. The results can be used to propose campaigns to attract faculty toward these effective engineering learning environments.

The development of ethical awareness and ethical reasoning is a critical part of engineering education. Appropriate assessments are needed to determine if the educational interventions are effective in developing these skills. Although there are measures to assess general moral reasoning (e.g., DIT2), they do not take into consideration the peculiarities of handling ethical situations in engineering rather than ethical situations in general. In addition, because most undergraduates learn to apply ethical reasoning to engineering through design courses that are taught in teams, it is important to understand the team ethical climate. To address this need, our research team is developing instruments to assess both individual moral reasoning and team ethical climate in an engineering context. As part of the validation efforts, we have conducted individual interviews and team observations to triangulate data from other sources and aid in data interpretation. In this work-in-progress research paper we present an overview of the instruments and our qualitative study design including our interview protocol and analysis approach. At the FIE conference, we will present initial findings from the analyses and discuss how these results are being used to validate and/or modify both the individual engineering ethical reasoning and team climate instruments being developed.

The motivation of the special session was to allow engineering educators and researchers to experience two different instruments intended to assess ethical reasoning-one which measures general moral reasoning, and one that is situated in the engineering context-so they can identify the knowledge, skills, and attitudes that are specific to engineering. This will inform how we teach and assess engineering ethics, and equip educators with tools for using these instruments as part of the student learning. The special session format will allow for discussion and debate on the relevance of the approach and appropriateness for our own classrooms.

Engineering educators daily negotiate the formidable task of developing the twenty-first century engineer's competence to enter and thrive in the workplace. With this focus, many have conducted investigations into both what defines such professional competence and how such competence forms within students. In this investigation, we study how professional competence has developed among alumni of Engineering Projects in Community Service (EPICS), as understood through their retrospective perceptions. We are conducting a mixed methods study in order to understand competence development, and this paper presents the design and administration of a survey questionnaire that is informing the qualitative portion of the study. Findings from both aspects of the study will be presented at the conference.

In this paper, we describe our process for creating a design task to assess students' understanding of human-centered design. The development process involved conducting a series of pilot tests, with analyses of the data from each prior pilot motivating revisions made to the next versions of the assessment design task. This paper is a formative look at the seven iterations of the design task that have been administered. We will discuss the information we gained about the students' understanding and the design task itself and how it informed the revisions. We will also discuss student perceptions of the design task, features of the design task that helped or hindered eliciting, and capturing, the participants' design process and major breakthroughs in the task development process.

This paper investigates the design collaboration process between the Interaction Design (IXD) program and Engineering Projects in Community Service (EPICS) program at Purdue University. There have been quite a few recent research focused on analyzing the collaboration between Industrial Design students and Engineering students. However, little in the literature has been dedicated to discuss the education of Interaction Design and its collaboration with engineering programs. In this research, we tried to identify characteristics that differentiate IXD and EPICS students by focusing on the experiences of the IXD students. Some characteristics made the collaboration successful, but other created frustrations. In order to understand, explore, and evaluate the collaboration process, we collected the data during and after the collaboration and qualitatively analyzed it using a design collaboration model. This analysis identified several interesting features of this interdisciplinary collaboration. The collaboration between two programs benefited both sides and will be conducted regularly. The understanding gained from this study helps to understand and manage the discourse during the interdisciplinary collaboration, which will benefit our future education and inspire better interdisciplinary education and collaboration.

Design is a central aspect of engineering and engineering education, but is challenging to teach and even more challenging to assess. In this special session participants co-construct an understanding of design and what aspects of design should be (and can be) assessed. Additionally, the special session will review the instrument development process (including the process of validating instruments) and will provide examples of existing instruments for assessing learners' understanding of design. These instruments measure a variety of topics and concepts related to design, have been designed for many different audiences and have been developed for different purposes. This session will equip educators with tools that are useful for assessing and promoting students' understanding of design. Additionally, this session may benefit educators and researchers interested in adopting or adapting design assessments for use with K-12 populations.

Service learning is a rapidly growing pedagogy in higher education and has come under increased visibility within engineering and computer science. Service-learning has been cited as a potential tool for increasing student engagement as well as diversity among our engineering, technology and computing student bodies. It has opportunities to excite the next generation of engineers, addressing issues including retention and diversity as well as learning in our classrooms. This workshop will introduce interested faculty, students and professionals to service-learning models and will provide resources for them to implement such programs at their respective institutions.

This special session addresses a challenge posed by engineering ethics: What does it mean? Review of the literature shows many competing definitions, each with their own understandings of the term ethics and the role it plays in engineering. Our aim is to review the different uses of the term "engineering ethics," along with several other common terms, such as "professional ethics" and "professional responsibility," and consider what might constitute clearer and more meaningful ways of understanding engineering ethics. As an interdisciplinary field, engineering ethics must represent both of its major parts: engineering and ethics. Examples of engineering ethics in the literature do not always make clear what aspects of ethics — a very large and complex field of philosophy — is being employed in an engineering context. Group activity and discussion will instigate a debate on how we should understand these terms and how we can be better about clarifying the key features of engineering ethics and its role in engineering education.

Abstract This paper describes the implementation of a constraint‐based parser, PARSEC (Parallel ARchitecture SEntence Constrainer), which has the required flexibility that a user may easily construct a custom grammar and test it. Once the user designs grammar parameters, constraints, and a lexicon, our system checks them for consistency and creates a parser for the grammar. The parser has an X‐windows interface that allows a user to view the state of a parse of a sentence, test new constraints, and dump the constraint network to a file. The parser has an option to perform the computationally expensive constraint propagation steps on the MasPar MP‐1. Stream and socket communication was used to interface the MasPar constraint parser with a standard X‐windows interface on our Sun Sparcstation. The design of our heterogeneous parser has benefitted from the use of object‐oriented techniques. Without these techniques, it would have been more difficult to combine the processing power of the MasPar with a Sun Sparcstation. Also, these techniques allowed the parser to gracefully evolve from a system that operated on single sentences, to one capable of processing word graphs containing multiple sentences, consistent with speech processing. This system should provide an important component of a real‐time speech understanding system.

We have extended Maruyama's [5, 6, 7] constraint dependency grammar (CDG) to process a lattice or graph of sentence hypotheses instead of separate text strings. A post-processor to a speech recognizer producing N-best hypotheses generates the word graph representation, which is then augmented with information required for parsing. We will summarize the CDG parsing algorithm and then describe how the algorithm is extended to process a word graph on a single processor machine.

No abstract available.