This full research paper explores how academics and engineering professionals view the incorporation of DEI into engineering ethics codes. Engineering professional societies have integrated DEI explicitly or implicitly into their codes of ethics. Yet, DEI is contested and even banned in many institutions of higher education in the US. Thus, there is a need to understand the relationship between ethics and DEI in engineering, including how engineering practitioners and scholars view DEI should be canonized in the profession. In this study, we addressed two research questions: (1) “To what extent and in what ways did participants view it to be important to incorporate DEI into an engineering ethics code?” and (2) “How do participants view the incorporation of DEI into the IEEE code of ethics?” The research methodology included a qualitative analysis of interview responses from engineering academics and practicing engineers regarding the integration of DEI into engineering codes of ethics, as well as their perceptions of IEEE's current code of ethics. We conducted semi-structured interviews with 25 engineering faculty members and 25 engineering practitioners between June 2022 and April 2023. During interviews, we shared the IEEE code of ethics and asked participants to share their perspectives of the code. Participants felt that embedding DEI principles into engineering ethics codes was important to ensure equitable treatment, access, and representation across all levels of the profession. Many participants felt that ethics codes should have a more concerted focus on DEI and DEI principles, whereas some participants questioned whether DEI should be within an engineering ethics code at all. Findings from this study can inform future innovations at the nexus of ethics and DEI. We specifically hope this work will encourage professional societies to continue integrating DEI within engineering codes of ethics with the undergirding confidence that many stakeholders across both engineering and academic communities are supportive of such integration.

Student mental health issues have been on the rise in recent years. Many factors play a role in mental health issues, including culture and climate. Engineering culture is known to be very difficult and oftentimes toxic which can exacerbate mental health issues. This panel will discuss various mental health struggles and the ties between mental health and engineering culture. The goal of this panel is to get audience members thinking about how we can change engineering culture to be one that is more nurturing and places importance on mental well-being.

In this WIP research study, we depict our approach to investigating how US faculty members in engineering education conceptualize Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI). The recruitment of underrepresented faculty members, retention of these faculty members, and institutional racism are continuing issues in higher education. Implementing DEI initiatives within institutions can help engineering departments effectively respond to the aforementioned issues. Prioritizing DEI in institutional cultures is not only morally necessary, but its incorporation may also affect minoritized individuals' feelings of belongingness and performance in research, teaching practices in classrooms, and service. We argue that is essential to understand faculty members' perceptions and experiences with DEI in order to modify institutional cultures in ways that can wholly realize DEI aspirations. The purpose of this study is to address the research questions, “How do faculty members in engineering conceptualize Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion?”, “How do faculty members in engineering experience Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in their work?”, and “How do faculty members' conceptions manifest in their experiences with DEI in their work?” We explored faculty members' experiences related to DEI in their work environment and participants unpacked experiences in research, teaching, or service. We collected interviews with 25 faculty members from engineering or philosophy programs who teach engineering students in U.S. universities. We used a purposeful recruitment method to include participants who self-identified across a range of demographic characteristics and who brought expertise in either DEI or engineering ethics. Findings from this study provide administrators, faculty members, professionals, and researchers in engineering education with strategies improve cultures by prioritizing DEI in U.S. higher education institutions and organizations.

Faculty members are stewards of academic engineering cultures and drivers of the ethical formation of our future engineers. To develop better ethics training tools we need to understand the diversity of faculty experiences and perceptions of ethics. In this study, we seek to unpack the experiences biomedical engineering faculty members have related to ethics in engineering research. We address the research question, “What are the features of research experiences that biomedical engineering faculty members discuss in the context of ethics in engineering research?” Sixteen biomedical engineering faculty members participated in this study. Faculty participants varied with respect to type of faculty position (tenured, tenure-track, non-tenure track), rank, gender, race/ethnicity, and geographic location. We utilized content analysis of semi-structured interviews to characterize the experiences these faculty members discussed. This analysis involved iterative cycles of open and axial coding to identify relevant categories and their constituent elements Faculty members described experiences that differed in context (physical setting, research phase, their current academic rank, their role in the experience), ethical topic area, ethical challenge, and characterization of ethical action. These findings will enable us to better consider how extant approaches to developing ethical engineering researchers in biomedical engineering align with the experiences of current biomedical engineering faculty members.

This Work-in-Progress Research Paper describes an ongoing research study to identify ethical behaviors in engineering. We use Delphi procedures for collecting and analyzing data across multiple rounds with the ultimate goal of distinguishing ethical behaviors from other normative behaviors in engineering. Ethical behaviors are an increasingly prominent type of learning goal in engineering ethics education, but ethical behaviors are challenging to define and assess. Promoting ethical behaviors first requires a shared understanding of what behaviors are considered ethical in engineering. While scholars have debated what counts as ethical engineering, this study adopts an empirical approach to understanding what is ethical by asking experts in engineering ethics how ethical behaviors differ from other normative behaviors in engineering. We use a Delphi process to develop consensus on ethical behaviors in engineering among a panel of 27 academics and practicing engineers. Through iterative rounds of questionnaires, the panelists offer their insights and perspectives, interrogate opinions of other panelists, and offer responses when they disagree with the positions of peer panelists. Results of the Delphi process will include understanding the types of normative behaviors that are commonly agreed upon as ethical or non-ethical in nature, as well as identifying areas of disagreement among the panel. This work aims to provide clarity around what constitutes ethical engineering practice, with implications for scholars and educators interested in engineering ethics.

This WIP paper describes the development, implementation, and preliminary lessons learned from co-creation workshops with engineering design instructors. Co-creation is a generative process to collect and integrate diverse perspectives and offers a novel approach to engineering education research. Empathy is also a relatively new concept in engineering education, but literature has shown empathy can lead to improved engineering design outcomes. The primary objective of our study is to use co-creation to develop a model that depicts how empathy manifests in engineering design. We engaged in co-creation with instructors at universities across the United States to generate a collective understanding of how empathy manifests across engineering design contexts, and we will use these findings to iterate on an extant empathy in design model. The model will inform instructional assessments and pedagogies for integrating empathy in engineering design, which will enable (1) instructors to understand the extent to which their students empathize in ways that instructors hope they will and (2) have needed strategies to respond effectively to promote empathy's use in design.

This Work-in-Progress Research paper investigates ethical motivation in engineering students across a single semester of an interdisciplinary engineering ethics course. Ethical motivation is the process of deciding to act upon an ethical decision based on one’s valuing of ethics, as well as one’s ability to prioritize moral concerns and professional values over personal interests. To prepare students to prioritize ethical and professional obligations, ethical training needs to help students become aware of, align, and act upon both their personal and professional values. This study operationalizes ethical motivation using Nancy Tuana’s moral literacy framework and James Rest’s four component model of morality. To assess engineering students’ ethical motivation, we collected quantitative and qualitative data from an engineering ethics course offered in Spring 2022. This paper describes the theoretical frameworks guiding this study, the data collection procedures, and the planned data analyses. The goal of this study is to contribute to understanding ethical formation in engineering education. Prior research on ethical formation in engineering has largely focused on ethical judgment and ethical sensitivity. We expand on prior work by exploring the role of ethical motivation in engineering students’ ethical formation. Findings from this study will provide insights into how students internalize professional values into their views of engineers’ roles and ultimately into their future practice as engineers.

Engineering curricula provide students with opportunities to construct their understanding of what constitutes ethical engineering practice. This study examines how biomedical engineering (BME) students conceptualize ethics in a biomedical engineering context. Our previous work-in-progress study identified ten ethical considerations salient to biomedical engineering faculty members’ incorporation of ethics into their program: Economic, Environmental, Interpersonal, Legal, Organizational, Personal, Professional, Societal, Technological, and Theoretical. This study extends that work by determining how these ethical considerations were present in biomedical engineering students’ conceptualizations of ethics in biomedical engineering. We interviewed four senior-level biomedical engineering students nearing graduation from the same program in a large Midwestern university in the United States. Five individuals from engineering education or biomedical engineering backgrounds reviewed these interviews in an iterative and collaborative process. Findings from this study include a revised set of ethical considerations. This study can facilitate future dialogue on ethical considerations in the context of biomedical engineering and, we hope, engineering ethics more broadly.

In this work-in-progress (WIP) study, we begin to identify explicit links between ethics and diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) in engineering education and closely related fields. We use systematic literature review procedures coupled with a qualitative content analytic approach to identify these explicit links within engineering education journals and conference papers. Through this WIP, we identify preliminary themes that represent explicit discourses connecting ethics and DEI and we cite associated literature. We unpack four themes that have a prominent presence in the abstracts that we have reviewed: cultural, global, social, and sustainable. These explicit connections will support future systematic review procedures wherein we will aim to identify implicit DEI and ethics connections via an analysis of whole manuscripts. While preliminary, we hope that these four themes can prompt strategies to connect ethics and DEI more purposefully when teaching towards these and related topics.

This Research Full Paper explores the relationship between civic-mindedness and empathy, both of which are instrumental to helping engineers meaningfully engage with community members and their needs. This study addresses the research question: “What aspects of civic-mindedness are significant predictors of empathy in first-year engineering students?” We administered a survey to first-year engineering students in Fall 2019 that included the Civic-Minded Graduate Scale (as a measure of civic-mindedness) and the Interpersonal Reactivity Index (as a measure of empathic concern and perspective taking). We administered the survey once at the start of the course and again at the end of the course to measure changes in civic-mindedness and empathy across the semester. We used 366 complete survey responses to generate regression models predicting students' empathic concern and perspective taking tendencies based on five civic-mindedness factors. Results indicated that, when adjusting for students' civic-mindedness at the start of the semester, select aspects of civic-mindedness inform students' general empathic tendencies. These findings suggest that teaching civic-mindedness to engineering students can also enhance their empathic skills and dispositions.

In this WIP study, our primary objective is to begin identifying what faculty perceive as important for ethical practice in biomedical engineering. We analyzed two primary data sources to address this objective. First, we analyzed curricular artifacts developed by five biomedical engineering faculty members at a single large Urban Midwestern University in the USA. Second, beginning with codes established by Katz, we analyzed interviews with these same five faculty members to identify ethical considerations salient to faculty mental models. Through these analyses, we identified nine ethical considerations which draw attention to aspects of engineering practice that faculty deem of ethical import. Moreover, these considerations were evident in both curricular artifacts and interviews. The considerations included: Economic; Environmental; Interpersonal; Legal; Organizational; Personal; Professional; Societal; Technological; and Theoretical. We provide descriptions of these considerations along with associated extracts from the curricular artifacts and interviews. These findings can benefit instructors by helping make evident the many and significant ethical considerations salient to engineering. In the future, we aim to more purposefully triangulate the alignment between faculty mental models and the ethical considerations they prioritize in their instruction.

This Work-In-Progress paper seeks to continue the development of a framework with which to organize engineering ethics instructional approaches. We build on a recent coding framework that was developed as part of a systematic review of US post-secondary engineering ethics education literature. We apply and iterate on the framework by analyzing the 2016 National Academy of Engineering report, "Infusing Ethics into the Development of Engineers: Exemplary Education Activities and Programs," which includes two-page synopses of 25 exemplary ethics programs. By applying the framework to these exemplars, we aim to identify prominent instructional approaches utilized across NAE exemplars and the extent to which NAE exemplars' instructional approaches differ from those identified in the prior systematic review. This WIP has three preliminary outcomes: (1) identification of trends in instructional design approaches across the NAE exemplars, (2) comparison of the instructional design approaches of NAE exemplars with the prior systematic review, and (3) identification of next steps needed to develop a more holistic picture of how ethics is taught in US post-secondary engineering contexts. Example revisions to the coding framework involved combining community-engagement and real-world exposure, broadening micro-insertion to sociotechnical integration, and coding for explicit mentoring components of instruction. A future research step involves further specification of these codes to detail how the NAE exemplars applied select instructional approaches, including heuristics, ethical theories, and case studies, and real-world engagement.

This Work-in-Progress Research paper introduces a qualitative study about engineering students' perceptions and experiences with civic engagement. This study extends the scholarship on civic engagement in higher education into a context that has received relatively little attention: the engineering profession. As professionals, engineers have a responsibility to serve public welfare and community interests. Engineers can contribute their skills to serve community needs and improve the livelihoods of community members. Postsecondary engineering education provides a valuable opportunity to help students develop an appreciation for the civic aspects of the profession. As a result, it is important to understand how engineering programs influence students' civic-minded dispositions. Using a social cognitive approach, this study seeks to understand how civic mindedness manifests in engineering students' pre-curricular, curricular, and co-curricular experiences and how these experiences shape their perceptions of civics within the engineering profession. This paper outlines the theoretical approach and research design of this study, including data collection methods and validity considerations. The paper concludes with a summary of future work.

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 study involves the evaluation of the second implementation of a Research Experiences for Teacher Advancement In Nanotechnology (RETAIN) program offered at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI). RETAIN represents a professional development model for providing high school teachers with laboratory research experiences in nanoscience and related content areas. In this intensive summer program, teachers spend six weeks conducting nanotechnology-related research in an IUPUI lab. As part of the RETAIN program, teachers complete six credit hours of coursework, wherein they translate their research experiences into the design of classroom modules. Teachers are expected to then implement their modules within their own classrooms during the subsequent academic year. This evaluation focuses on teachers' experiences in IUPUI labs during the summer of 2016, along with three teachers' implementation of nanotechnology labs within their courses during the 2016-2017 school year. To evaluate RETAIN, we explored teacher satisfaction, changes in teachers' content knowledge and nanotechnology perceptions, as well as changes in teachers' epistemological beliefs. Further, we explored the impact of the three teachers' module integration on their students' STEM attitudes and nanotechnology perceptions. The findings indicated that teachers were generally satisfied with the research and course experiences. Further, as a result of RETAIN participation, teachers showed increased nanotechnology content knowledge and knowledge of nanotechnology-related careers. Lastly, three teachers' integration of nanotechnology modules indicated that their students had significantly improved perceptions of nanotechnology's potential coupled with more knowledge of nanotechnology-related careers. The paper concludes with considerations of the quantitative findings in light of teachers' written reflections and author observations of teacher module integration in their classrooms.

With the ongoing demand for improved K-12 STEM education, a push for dual-credit courses, and the goal of college and career-ready high school graduates, schools have implemented numerous STEM programs including those focused on engineering. Curricular programs, such Engineering by Design, Project Lead the Way (PLTW), and EPICS High are being executed by schools across the country with varied amounts of success as measured by student-level outcomes. Exploring costs of these program implementations and their associated outcomes is vital in deciding the best means for preparing our future engineering workforce. This paper utilizes cost analysis to provide initial insights into the relative impact of one of the most common high school engineering program, PLTW. Specifically, by relying on data reported in select literature, we investigate the impacts versus the costs of implementing PLTW in high schools. Cost data includes select variables such as student section size, school size, and school type. These findings will provide a baseline for understanding cost variations of the PLTW curriculum across contexts, as well as what impact cost variations may have on student outcomes.

The primary goal of engineering education is to prepare students to work as productive engineers in society. This preparation traditionally focuses on developing students' discipline related technical and analytical knowledge, skills, and abilities. However, recent initiatives to develop a more holistic engineer have shed light on an aspect of engineering education that is largely lacking - the development of essential nontechnical knowledge, skills and abilities. In this paper, we propose a framework for considering the people part of engineering to organize these other kinds of knowledge, skills, and abilities that need to be addressed in engineering education. Informed by scholarly literature on development and learning, the framework presented in this work argues for people as central to engineering. We offer a framework on engineering for, with, and as people. Engineering for people requires a sense of the influences, constraints, and criteria people impose on the design and development of engineering solutions. Engineering with people emphasizes working collaboratively with a diverse group of people. Engineering as a person has one recognize the values, beliefs, knowledge, and skills driving the development of engineered solutions. We present examples of pedagogical strategies to integrate the various "people" skills into engineering courses and 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.

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.

This paper explores what is included in the worldview of the modern engineer and how this compares to the concept of sustainability. Worldviews are important to humanity because they are interwoven throughout civilizations. Societies do not contain but one homogenous worldview, however, they do essentially contain a dominant worldview characterized by the collection of values, beliefs, habits, and norms. This dominant worldview forms the frame of reference for a collectivity of people, such as a nation or culture. In this paper, we attempt to articulate modern worldviews, the contemporary engineering worldview, and the sustainability worldview. We use the concept of worldviews to address the compatibility of sustainability and engineering. Our synthesis suggests that the two ideologies are misaligned and incompatible in many respects. We suggest that for sustainability to gain prominence within an engineering context, engineers and engineering educators must first become conscious of these inconsistencies. Through the philosophical synthesis presented in this paper, it is our goal to begin rethinking how we educate engineering students about engineering and sustainability.

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.