Enhancing engineering students' ethical reasoning: Situating reflexive principlism within the SIRA framework

摘要

Background: Educating engineers to reason through the ethical decisions they encounter when developing or implementing new technologies is a critical challenge. However, engineering educators have not widely adopted a framework for preparing engineering students to analyze ethical issues.Purpose/Hypothesis: We developed and tested an approach for enhancing the ethical reasoning of engineering students. This approach integrates reflexive principlism, an ethical reasoning approach, within a structured learning framework, scaffolded, interactive, and reflective analysis, or SIRA. We hypothesized that students' ethical reasoning abilities and empathic perspective-taking tendencies would increase.Design/Method: We implemented and tested the integrated approach over five semesters with graduate-level engineering students through a quasi-experimental, controlled research design. We measured changes in ethical reasoning using the Engineering Ethical Reasoning Instrument (EERI) and the Defining Issues Test 2 (DIT2) and empathic tendencies using the Interpersonal Reactivity Index (IRI). We examined relationships among measures through correlation analysis.Results: The EERI instrumentation indicated that the approach significantly increased the ethical reasoning abilities of graduate-level engineering students. However, the DIT2 findings did not indicate change. The IRI indicated perspective-taking tendencies were enhanced and personal distress tendencies were reduced. Postcourse correlational data indicated moderate relationships between perspective-taking and ethical reasoning as measured by the IRI and the EERI indexes.Conclusions: This study provides a theoretical approach for developing ethical reasoning and empathic perspective-taking among graduate-level engineering students. It also provides a theoretical framework, a pedagogical approach, and evaluation methods that others may utilize.