A psychological model that integrates ethics in engineering education

Area of Science:

• Engineering Education
• Ethics in STEM
• Moral Development Theory

Background:

• Engineering practice faces growing ethical complexities.
• Current engineering education often inadequately prepares students for ethical challenges.
• Diverse institutional approaches exist for teaching ethics to engineering undergraduates.

Purpose of the Study:

• To propose a novel pedagogical method for integrating ethics into engineering education.
• To base the proposed method on established theories of moral development.

Main Methods:

• The study proposes a pedagogical framework for ethics integration.
• The framework is grounded in Kohlberg's stage theory of moral development.
• This approach contrasts with general ethics courses or unstructured integration.

Main Results:

• The proposed method offers a structured approach to engineering ethics education.
• It aims to enhance students' moral reasoning capabilities.
• Implementation details for integrating ethics are outlined.

Conclusions:

• A pedagogically grounded method for engineering ethics integration is presented.
• This approach can better prepare engineers for ethical dilemmas.
• Further research can explore the efficacy of this Kohlberg-based model.