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COVID-19 pandemic reveals challenges in engineering ethics education
Engineering ethics can be divided into three spheres, namely the technical, the professional, and the social. Ideally, engineering students should engage with all three spheres of ethics, but the literature suggests that this might not be the case. How do engineering students engage with the three s...
Autores principales: | , , , , , , , |
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Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
Publicado: |
Springer International Publishing
2022
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Materias: | |
Acceso en línea: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9472725/ http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s40889-022-00156-4 |
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author | Nguyen, Luan M. Poleacovschi, Cristina Faust, Kasey M. Padgett-Walsh, Kate Feinstein, Scott G. Vaziri, Bobby LaPatin, Michaela Rutherford, Cassandra J. |
author_facet | Nguyen, Luan M. Poleacovschi, Cristina Faust, Kasey M. Padgett-Walsh, Kate Feinstein, Scott G. Vaziri, Bobby LaPatin, Michaela Rutherford, Cassandra J. |
author_sort | Nguyen, Luan M. |
collection | PubMed |
description | Engineering ethics can be divided into three spheres, namely the technical, the professional, and the social. Ideally, engineering students should engage with all three spheres of ethics, but the literature suggests that this might not be the case. How do engineering students engage with the three spheres of engineering ethics during a global pandemic? The COVID-19 pandemic represents a dramatic and ongoing real-world challenge affecting many students personally. This research explores the extent to which engineering students engage with each sphere of engineering ethics by examining how engineering students understand their roles in addressing the pandemic and its implications. We conducted a survey with undergraduate engineering students (n = 410) at a university in the Midwest. Qualitative analysis suggests that there was low engagement with both social ethics and professional ethics among respondents, while there was higher engagement with technical ethics. Quantitative analysis suggests that non-conservative engineering students from less wealthy families in our study show higher engagement with technical ethics as compared to conservative engineering students from less wealthy families. Non-conservative engineering students from wealthy families, however, show similar engagement with technical ethics as compared to conservative engineering students from wealthy families. In addition, engineering students from both wealthy and less wealthy families show higher engagement with technical ethics if they reside in urban areas as compared to engineering students from both wealthy and less wealthy families in non-urban areas. In addition, the difference in terms of engagement with technical ethics between non-urban engineering students from less wealthy families and urban engineering students from less wealthy families is larger than the difference in terms of engagement with technical ethics between non-urban engineering students from wealthy families and urban engineering students from wealthy families. Further investigation will be needed to explain these findings. However, qualitative results confirm that, despite the potential for the pandemic to encourage engagement with all three spheres of ethics, there continues to be low engagement with ethics beyond the technical level. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s40889-022-00156-4. |
format | Online Article Text |
id | pubmed-9472725 |
institution | National Center for Biotechnology Information |
language | English |
publishDate | 2022 |
publisher | Springer International Publishing |
record_format | MEDLINE/PubMed |
spelling | pubmed-94727252022-09-15 COVID-19 pandemic reveals challenges in engineering ethics education Nguyen, Luan M. Poleacovschi, Cristina Faust, Kasey M. Padgett-Walsh, Kate Feinstein, Scott G. Vaziri, Bobby LaPatin, Michaela Rutherford, Cassandra J. International Journal of Ethics Education Article Engineering ethics can be divided into three spheres, namely the technical, the professional, and the social. Ideally, engineering students should engage with all three spheres of ethics, but the literature suggests that this might not be the case. How do engineering students engage with the three spheres of engineering ethics during a global pandemic? The COVID-19 pandemic represents a dramatic and ongoing real-world challenge affecting many students personally. This research explores the extent to which engineering students engage with each sphere of engineering ethics by examining how engineering students understand their roles in addressing the pandemic and its implications. We conducted a survey with undergraduate engineering students (n = 410) at a university in the Midwest. Qualitative analysis suggests that there was low engagement with both social ethics and professional ethics among respondents, while there was higher engagement with technical ethics. Quantitative analysis suggests that non-conservative engineering students from less wealthy families in our study show higher engagement with technical ethics as compared to conservative engineering students from less wealthy families. Non-conservative engineering students from wealthy families, however, show similar engagement with technical ethics as compared to conservative engineering students from wealthy families. In addition, engineering students from both wealthy and less wealthy families show higher engagement with technical ethics if they reside in urban areas as compared to engineering students from both wealthy and less wealthy families in non-urban areas. In addition, the difference in terms of engagement with technical ethics between non-urban engineering students from less wealthy families and urban engineering students from less wealthy families is larger than the difference in terms of engagement with technical ethics between non-urban engineering students from wealthy families and urban engineering students from wealthy families. Further investigation will be needed to explain these findings. However, qualitative results confirm that, despite the potential for the pandemic to encourage engagement with all three spheres of ethics, there continues to be low engagement with ethics beyond the technical level. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s40889-022-00156-4. Springer International Publishing 2022-09-14 /pmc/articles/PMC9472725/ http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s40889-022-00156-4 Text en © The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022, Springer Nature or its licensor holds exclusive rights to this article under a publishing agreement with the author(s) or other rightsholder(s); author self-archiving of the accepted manuscript version of this article is solely governed by the terms of such publishing agreement and applicable law. This article is made available via the PMC Open Access Subset for unrestricted research re-use and secondary analysis in any form or by any means with acknowledgement of the original source. These permissions are granted for the duration of the World Health Organization (WHO) declaration of COVID-19 as a global pandemic. |
spellingShingle | Article Nguyen, Luan M. Poleacovschi, Cristina Faust, Kasey M. Padgett-Walsh, Kate Feinstein, Scott G. Vaziri, Bobby LaPatin, Michaela Rutherford, Cassandra J. COVID-19 pandemic reveals challenges in engineering ethics education |
title | COVID-19 pandemic reveals challenges in engineering ethics education |
title_full | COVID-19 pandemic reveals challenges in engineering ethics education |
title_fullStr | COVID-19 pandemic reveals challenges in engineering ethics education |
title_full_unstemmed | COVID-19 pandemic reveals challenges in engineering ethics education |
title_short | COVID-19 pandemic reveals challenges in engineering ethics education |
title_sort | covid-19 pandemic reveals challenges in engineering ethics education |
topic | Article |
url | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9472725/ http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s40889-022-00156-4 |
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