Engineering ethics education: aligning practice and outcomes

Analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of current efforts indicate that engineering programs lack consistent, accurate, and reliable methods of teaching professional ethics and measuring their outcomes. This raises two equally important issues: how we teach ethics and which student outcomes we are assessing. Engineering students are performing poorly on the Ethics part of the Fundamental Engineering exam, so clearly there is a misalignment between teaching practice and outcomes. Engineering ethics instruction is often focused on the instruction of moral judgment and assessing ethical awareness via students' responses to vignettes describing ethical dilemmas. In this study, we propose extending current practice from a focus on teaching moral reasoning to also considering students' ethical awareness and future behavior. We introduce motivational variables that engineering educators should consider when designing ethics curricula. The study findings suggest that these motivational factors may influence students' ethical awareness and predict their ethical behavior.