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Design of Web-based Professional Ethics Modules to Alleviate Acculturation Barriers for International Graduate Students in Engineering

Abstract

This paper reports on an ongoing National Science Foundation (NSF)-sponsored research and education project.1 In recent years, engineering programs in the United States have sought to develop a larger role for professional ethics education in the curriculum. Accreditation requirements have helped facilitate this shift. These requirements have themselves been developed to help ensure that engineering graduates have the knowledge and skills—non- technical as well as technical—needed in today’s engineering profession. With this in mind, it is worth noting that almost half of all engineering graduate students in the U.S. are international students. And about forty percent of these remain in the United States and are employed in some facet of engineering research and practice. It therefore seems prudent for the profession that these students, coming from diverse backgrounds, receive some systematic exposure to engineering ethics as it is conceived and practiced in the United States. International students face challenges that domestic students do not encounter—cultural competency, language proficiency, and acculturation stress—making them a natural audience for an educational intervention. This project aims to develop instructional materials that help international engineering graduate students in acclimating to engineering ethics standards and expectations in this country. The details of the materials and the research design to test their efficacy will be discussed.

Introduction

In the last two or three decades there has been growing recognition within the engineering profession in the United States of the importance of professional ethics education for engineers.2,3 This is reflected in current ABET accreditation standards that require “an understanding of professional and ethical responsibility” as well as other competencies related to understanding engineering’s role and impact in the wider world. This has by no means guaranteed that ethics education for U.S. engineering undergraduates is of a uniform content, quality, or depth.4 Nonetheless the movement appears to be clearly in the direction of more coverage, whether in the form of stand-alone ethics courses or ethics modules embedded in existing courses; at the very least, engineering programs must show that their graduates have been exposed to ethics content to a level adequate to satisfy evaluators.

The underlying presumption of such ethics education requirements is that they contribute to the professionalism of engineers and hence to the welfare of the public. The vast majority of undergraduate engineering students will directly enter the engineering workplace. The desire is for them to possess an understanding of the “application of moral principles and professional standards to situations encountered by professionals in the practice of engineering.”5 But the specific expectations placed upon engineers in the United States for professionalism and ethical conduct are based upon the particular conception of engineering and engineering ethics that exists in this country. That conception of engineering and engineering ethics is a product of the historical interplay of U.S. engineering professional organizations, U.S. engineering educational

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Newberry, B., & Lawson, W., & Austin, K., & Gorsuch, G., & Darwin, T. (2008, June), Design Of Web Based Professional Ethics Modules To Alleviate Acculturation Barriers For International Graduate Students In Engineering Paper presented at 2008 Annual Conference & Exposition, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. 10.18260/1-2--4365