A qualitative study exploring students´ engineering ethical reflections and their use in instrument validation

The development of ethical awareness and ethical reasoning is a critical part of engineering education. Appropriate assessments are needed to determine if the educational interventions are effective in developing these skills. Although there are measures to assess general moral reasoning (e.g., DIT2), they do not take into consideration the peculiarities of handling ethical situations in engineering rather than ethical situations in general. In addition, because most undergraduates learn to apply ethical reasoning to engineering through design courses that are taught in teams, it is important to understand the team ethical climate. To address this need, our research team is developing instruments to assess both individual moral reasoning and team ethical climate in an engineering context. As part of the validation efforts, we have conducted individual interviews and team observations to triangulate data from other sources and aid in data interpretation. In this work-in-progress research paper we present an overview of the instruments and our qualitative study design including our interview protocol and analysis approach. At the FIE conference, we will present initial findings from the analyses and discuss how these results are being used to validate and/or modify both the individual engineering ethical reasoning and team climate instruments being developed.