Engineering ethical curricula: Assessment of two approaches and recommendations

In this paper, we assess two approaches for delivery of engineering ethics: a full semester ethics course and an engineering course that includes a discipline-specific ethics module. We use the second edition of the Defining Issues Test (DIT) to measure moral reasoning ability. We compare improvement of moral reasoning ability for each class pre and post ethical instruction and compare the results to a control class with no ethical instruction. Although the full term ethics course had more improvement than the single module, neither ethical intervention showed significant improvement over the control group. We also found that there was little distinction between males and females and no distinction by age, although education level did have an impact on ethical judgment. Our results of the experimental groups compared to the control group suggest that the approaches that many universities use to provide ethical instruction to engineers is not sufficient to have an impact on general ethical reasoning ability. We provide recommendations for improving ethics in engineering education, such as an integrative approach delivered at multiple points in the curriculum and incorporating discipline-specific context.