Comparing First-Year Engineering Student Conceptions of Ethical Decision-Making to Performance on Standardized...

Area of Science:

• Engineering Education
• Moral Development
• Cognitive Psychology

Background:

• The Defining Issues Test 2 (DIT-2) and Engineering Ethical Reasoning Instrument (EERI) are standard tools for assessing ethical reasoning in general and engineering student populations, respectively.
• Undergraduate students, particularly in engineering, are frequently evaluated using these instruments to gauge their ethical development.
• Understanding the relationship between quantitative ethical reasoning scores and qualitative conceptualizations of ethical decision-making is crucial for refining educational assessments.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate the correlation between scores from the DIT-2 and EERI and concept maps of "ethical decision-making" among first-year undergraduate engineering students.
• To determine if higher postconventional moral development and advanced ethical reasoning skills, as measured by instruments, correlate with richer conceptualizations of ethical decision-making.
• To explore potential disparities between students' theoretical ethical reasoning abilities and their practical understanding of ethical decision-making processes.

Main Methods:

• Administered the Defining Issues Test 2 (DIT-2) and the Engineering Ethical Reasoning Instrument (EERI) to first-year undergraduate engineering students across multiple universities.
• Collected personal concept maps from students defining the phrase "ethical decision-making."
• Scored both the standardized instruments and the student-created concept maps to assess levels of ethical reasoning and conceptual complexity.

Main Results:

• No significant correlation was found between students' scores on the DIT-2 and EERI and the scoring of their concept maps on ethical decision-making.
• This lack of correlation suggests that students' conceptual understanding of ethical decision-making, as represented by concept maps, does not predict their performance on scenario-based ethical reasoning tasks.
• The findings indicate a potential disconnect between how first-year engineering students articulate ethical concepts and how they apply ethical reasoning in practice.

Conclusions:

• The study highlights a gap between quantitative measures of ethical reasoning and students' qualitative conceptualizations of ethical decision-making.
• There is a need for more precise methods to quantify engineering ethical reasoning and decision-making to better align assessment outcomes with educational goals.
• Further research is required to understand and address the disparity between theoretical ethical reasoning and situated ethical decision-making in engineering education.