A Short Course in Engineering Ethics: Opportunities and Challenges for Pedagogy and Assessment

Cortney Holles

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Conference: 2022 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition
Location: Minneapolis, MN
Publication Date: August 23, 2022
Start Date: June 26, 2022
End Date: June 29, 2022
Conference Session: Engineering Ethics Division: Approaches to Ethics Education (Part 1)
Page Count: 18
DOI: 10.18260/1-2--41555
Permanent URL: https://peer.asee.org/41555
Download Count: 525

Paper Authors

biography

Cortney Holles Colorado School of Mines

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Cortney Holles is a Teaching Professor in the Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences at Colorado School of Mines where she has taught and developed the required first-year ethics and writing course for STEM majors since 2004. She also teaches science communication and service learning. She defended her educational criticism/action research dissertation on “Faculty-Student Interaction and Impact on Well-Being in Higher Education” and earned her Ed.D in 2021. She is now engaged in the action steps resulting from her study, continuing to interact with faculty and students about their experiences of well-being on college campuses and advocating for reforms that better support students and faculty as whole people. Email cholles@mines.edu or text 303-250-5490 to connect!

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Abstract

This evidence-based practice paper presents the lessons learned from building and assessing a pilot short course in engineering ethics for freshman and transfer students. Universities are facing changing enrollment trends and engineering curricula is full of required content, making curricular reform fraught with challenges. The goal of this course is to engage students in meaningful discussions about professional and environmental ethics concepts and cases that impact the work of engineers. This paper will showcase the engineering ethics pedagogy employed in the course and present assessment findings, comparing student writing and outcomes from the regular course and the pilot of the short course. Colorado School of Mines requires a 4-credit hour freshman-level course in engineering ethics that also functions as a required writing class. In order to accommodate increasing numbers of transfer students who have taken composition at other institutions and traditional freshmen who have taken college level writing in high school, this short course eliminates writing instruction and 2 credit-hours. The short course is built around the required lecture series and reading assignments from the 4-credit hour course. Students still complete writing assignments, but receive limited writing instruction in the short version of the course. For the pilot semester of the short course, this researcher taught two sections of the short course and one section of the regular course in the fall semester of 2021. Students in both classes were assigned the same suite of content, consisting of lecture activities and reading assignments. Students in both classes wrote a summary paper, an evaluative annotated bibliography, and a researched abstract. In order to analyze the effectiveness of the short course, student quizzes and written work are compared and analyzed by the researcher in the spring of 2022. Opportunities that arise from the short course will be explored and challenges that develop will be analyzed. These findings will inform next steps at our institution and will lead to discussion about pedagogy and assessment for teaching engineering ethics, in particular in required courses with diverse student populations.

Citation
Format

Holles, C. (2022, August), A Short Course in Engineering Ethics: Opportunities and Challenges for Pedagogy and Assessment Paper presented at 2022 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition, Minneapolis, MN. 10.18260/1-2--41555

TY - CPAPER
AB - This evidence-based practice paper presents the lessons learned from building and assessing a pilot short course in engineering ethics for freshman and transfer students. Universities are facing changing enrollment trends and engineering curricula is full of required content, making curricular reform fraught with challenges. The goal of this course is to engage students in meaningful discussions about professional and environmental ethics concepts and cases that impact the work of engineers. This paper will showcase the engineering ethics pedagogy employed in the course and present assessment findings, comparing student writing and outcomes from the regular course and the pilot of the short course. Colorado School of Mines requires a 4-credit hour freshman-level course in engineering ethics that also functions as a required writing class. In order to accommodate increasing numbers of transfer students who have taken composition at other institutions and traditional freshmen who have taken college level writing in high school, this short course eliminates writing instruction and 2 credit-hours. The short course is built around the required lecture series and reading assignments from the 4-credit hour course. Students still complete writing assignments, but receive limited writing instruction in the short version of the course. For the pilot semester of the short course, this researcher taught two sections of the short course and one section of the regular course in the fall semester of 2021. Students in both classes were assigned the same suite of content, consisting of lecture activities and reading assignments. Students in both classes wrote a summary paper, an evaluative annotated bibliography, and a researched abstract. In order to analyze the effectiveness of the short course, student quizzes and written work are compared and analyzed by the researcher in the spring of 2022. Opportunities that arise from the short course will be explored and challenges that develop will be analyzed. These findings will inform next steps at our institution and will lead to discussion about pedagogy and assessment for teaching engineering ethics, in particular in required courses with diverse student populations.
AU - Cortney Holles
CY - Minneapolis, MN
DA - 2022/08/23
PB - ASEE Conferences
TI - A Short Course in Engineering Ethics: Opportunities and Challenges for Pedagogy and Assessment
UR - https://peer.asee.org/41555
DO - 10.18260/1-2--41555
ER -