This study explores engineering students’ understanding of engineering ethics as a socially situa... more This study explores engineering students’ understanding of engineering ethics as a socially situated and distributed feature of project teams. An important component of human understanding is implicit understanding, which is difficult to articulate and to study. To explore engineering students’ implicit understanding of ethics, a group discussion of the ethical and social issues involved in students’ ongoing engineering design projects was observed. Eight discussions from four senior design project (SDP) teams were observed and recorded. The video data were analyzed using cognitive ethnography and micro-scale discourse analysis. The results showed that each team had different implicit understanding of ethics; there was also a difference between each team’s explicit understanding and implicit understanding of ethical issues. Explicitly, students in all teams expressed some version of the view that they could not be responsible for the indirect consequence from their design, and instead it is mostly users’ or the third parties’ responsibility. Implicitly, however, there was significant variation between the teams. For example, one team’s discussion, their language choices and gestures, revealed an empathetic connection with the users. Another team understood potential ethical concerns as threats or attacks and became defensive about their design. These findings show that there are complicated layers of understanding about engineering ethics among SDP teams, and those layers are sometimes in tension. Understanding these layers and their development may be an important resource for training socially responsible engineers.
This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 1338735.
This study explores engineering students’ understanding of engineering ethics as a socially situa... more This study explores engineering students’ understanding of engineering ethics as a socially situated and distributed feature of project teams. An important component of human understanding is implicit understanding, which is difficult to articulate and to study. To explore engineering students’ implicit understanding of ethics, a group discussion of the ethical and social issues involved in students’ ongoing engineering design projects was observed. Eight discussions from four senior design project (SDP) teams were observed and recorded. The video data were analyzed using cognitive ethnography and micro-scale discourse analysis. The results showed that each team had different implicit understanding of ethics; there was also a difference between each team’s explicit understanding and implicit understanding of ethical issues. Explicitly, students in all teams expressed some version of the view that they could not be responsible for the indirect consequence from their design, and instead it is mostly users’ or the third parties’ responsibility. Implicitly, however, there was significant variation between the teams. For example, one team’s discussion, their language choices and gestures, revealed an empathetic connection with the users. Another team understood potential ethical concerns as threats or attacks and became defensive about their design. These findings show that there are complicated layers of understanding about engineering ethics among SDP teams, and those layers are sometimes in tension. Understanding these layers and their development may be an important resource for training socially responsible engineers.
This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 1338735.
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This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 1338735.
This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 1338735.