Impact of teaching business ethics on students’ attitudes. An experience of educational innovation

Questionable business practices highlight the growing interest in incorporating ethical content into curricula. However, there are gaps in research on the impact of teaching business ethics on university students’ attitudes. In particular, research on engineering students is scarce, despite the fact that many of these professionals will assume managerial roles. This paper compares two groups of engineering students through an innovative educational experience in which only one of the groups received business ethics content in the subject Business . To measure students’ attitudes, the widely validated Attitudes Toward Business Ethics Questionnaire was used. To the best of our knowledge, this study is the first to apply Rasch Measurement Theory to the ATBEQ in this research context, allowing a more rigorous psychometric assessment of the instrument and the derivation of a comparable interval-level measure, subject to model fit. The results show that there are no significant differences in the attitudes of the two groups after the teaching intervention. Finally, attitudes towards business ethics are more favourable when the scale items refer to one’s own behaviour than the behaviour of others. Likewise, a qualitative study using in-depth interviews delves into the explanation of the findings. The study provides practical implications and concrete recommendations for effective teaching methods and policies, while recommendations for future research are proposed.