Board 277: Exploring the Intersection of Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Ethics in Engineering: Project Overview and Preliminary Results

This study was motivated by the numerous empirical investigations documenting the importance of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) and ethics to engineering education and practice. However, the relationship between these phenomena has not been extensively studied, and research focused on ethics and DEI tends to exist within distinct scholarly spaces. Thus, engineering students, educators, and practitioners may fail to consider how ethics and DEI are related, which may limit how they understand and apply these concepts. To better understand ways that ethics and DEI connect in engineering education and practice, our study includes three phases: (1) a systematic review of how ethics and DEI are connected in peer-reviewed literature in engineering education and related fields, (2) semi-structured interviews exploring faculty members' mental models regarding the alignment between ethics and DEI, and (3) semi-structured interviews exploring engineering practitioners' mental models regarding the alignment between ethics and DEI. This ongoing study is in its fourth year and this short paper will provide an overview of project findings and emergent results associated with each phase.