Ethics
Ellgrift
AsystematicliteraturereviewofUSengineeringethicsinterventions.pdf
ORIGINAL PAPER
A Systematic Literature Review of US Engineering Ethics Interventions
Justin L. Hess1 • Grant Fore1,2
Received: 26 January 2017 / Accepted: 23 March 2017 / Published online: 11 April 2017
� Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2017
Abstract Promoting the ethical formation of engineering students through the cultivation of their discipline-specific knowledge, sensitivity, imagination, and
reasoning skills has become a goal for many engineering education programs
throughout the United States. However, there is neither a consensus throughout the
engineering education community regarding which strategies are most effective
towards which ends, nor which ends are most important. This study provides an
overview of engineering ethics interventions within the U.S. through the systematic
analysis of articles that featured ethical interventions in engineering, published in
select peer-reviewed journals, and published between 2000 and 2015. As a core
criterion, each journal article reviewed must have provided an overview of the
course as well as how the authors evaluated course-learning goals. In sum, 26
articles were analyzed with a coding scheme that included 56 binary items. The
results indicate that the most common methods for integrating ethics into engi-
neering involved exposing students to codes/standards, utilizing case studies, and
discussion activities. Nearly half of the articles had students engage with ethical
heuristics or philosophical ethics. Following the presentation of the results, this
study describes in detail four articles to highlight less common but intriguing
pedagogical methods and evaluation techniques. The findings indicate that there is
limited empirical work on ethics education within engineering across the United
States. Furthermore, due to the large variation in goals, approaches, and evaluation
& Justin L. Hess [email protected]
Grant Fore
1 STEM Education Innovation and Research Institute, Indiana University Purdue University
Indianapolis, Indianapolis, IN, USA
2 Department of Anthropology, University of Cape Town, Cape Town, Western Cape, South
Africa
123
Sci Eng Ethics (2018) 24:551–583
https://doi.org/10.1007/s11948-017-9910-6
methods described across interventions, this study does not detail ‘‘best’’ practices
for integrating ethics into engineering. The science and engineering education
community should continue exploring the relative merits of different approaches to
ethics education in engineering.
Keywords Ethics � Engineering ethics � Ethics education � Systematic review � Content analysis
Introduction
In 2001, Haws conducted a ‘‘mini’’-meta analysis of ethics interventions published
within the American Society of Engineering Education conference proceedings
between 1996 and 1999. His review indicated that within the context of ethics
education in engineering, six pedagogical techniques were the most pervasive.
These included teaching students about professional codes of ethics, humanist
readings, readings/discussions on ethical theory, ethical heuristics or decision-
making tools, case studies, and service learning. Notably, the specific focus of the
articles Haws analyzed tended to be ‘‘to transfer an understanding of ethics to the
student’’ (p. 223). Hence, this focus was a pre-cursor to the oft-cited ABET EC 2000
where criterion 3f, or an ‘‘understanding of professional and ethical responsibility,’’
became an explicit student outcome as part of university accreditation.
Following ABET 2000, universities created and implemented numerous
techniques for developing engineering students’ ethical understanding (Herkert
2000). However, the variations in how engineering schools covered ABET’s ethics
component continued to be quite diverse (Colby and Sullivan 2008). Alas, Colby
and Sullivan indicated that while many engineering school or university admin-
istrators felt that ‘‘professional responsibility and ethics’’ were components of their
curriculum, few departments ‘‘seemed to establish explicit goals in this area or
monitor and coordinate coverage’’ (p. 332). What is more disconcerting, however, is
that they found it to be ‘‘commonplace in our site visits for faculty, even department
chairs, to be unaware of whether or how their program supports its students’ ethical-
professional development’’ (p. 332). The problem, as indicated by Barry and Ohland
(2012), may be that ‘‘many engineering programs are unsure of how much
curriculum content is needed’’ for meeting ABET’s ethics criteria (p. 369).
Likewise, ABET recognized that during their 2010–2011 evaluations, criterion 3f
was one that engineering programs had notable difficulty evaluating (ABET 2016).
While many U.S. universities may have lacked an explicit focus on students’
ethical development, there are many universities who have implemented ethics in an
effective manner, as evident from the National Academy of Engineering’s (NAE
2016) recent publication of exemplary engineering ethics programs. As a review of
NAE’s report shows, ethical interventions within engineering continue to vary in
size, scope, and context. Nonetheless, the relative merit of these varying techniques,
including strategies for evaluating and comparing student outcomes across these
interventions, remains largely unknown. This is partly due to the limited body of
empirical work in this domain and partly due to the multiplicity of ethics-related
552 J. L. Hess, G. Fore
123
learning goals vying for attention among engineering educators. This paper seeks to
understand the nature of ethical interventions within post-secondary engineering
education more than 15 years after ABET EC 2000 by bridging the empirical work
published within four scholarly journals. Through this synthesis, the hope is that this
work will lead to an improved understanding of how to deliver and evaluate ethics
education within the context of engineering, along with what future work scholars
might pursue within this domain.
This manuscript begins with a brief background on engineering ethics education,
followed by the theoretical framework and methodology. The manuscript ends with
results of the systematic literature review, elaboration of four exemplary ethics
investigations, and a discussion of the findings in light of these results and the calls
for the inclusion of ethics within engineering.
Background
Today, professional ethics has become a central subject within engineering
education in the United States, due in part to an increased focus on professional
responsibilities of engineers (Fleddermann 2011), risks associated with rapid
technological development (Spier and Bird 2007), and ABET student outcomes
grounded in EC 2000. While the ABET board proposed a large shift in the student
outcomes in 2015, an emphasis on ethical understanding persisted.
NAE (2004) similarly suggested that students need to ‘‘possess a working
framework upon which high ethical standards and a strong sense of professionalism
can be developed’’ (emphases original, p. 56). More recently, as a core habit of mind,
NAE (2009) suggested that engineers must become attentive to ethical considerations,
they must realize ‘‘the impacts of engineering on people and the environment,’’ and
they must become considerate of ‘‘unintended consequences of a technology’’ (p. 5f).
ABET EC 2000 framed such a responsibility in a global context with the stated student
outcome of ‘‘the broad education necessary to understand the impact of engineering
solutions in a global, economic, environmental, and societal context.’’
Prior to 2000, Harris et al. (1996) suggested several common ethics-related
learning goals within engineering. These ranged from ‘‘to stimulate the ethical
imagination of students,’’ to ‘‘recognize ethical issues,’’ ‘‘to help students analyze
key ethical concepts and principles that are relevant to the particular profession or
practice,’’ ‘‘to help students deal with ethical disagreement, ambiguity, and
vagueness,’’ and ‘‘to encourage students to take ethical responsibility seriously’’ (p.
94). Newberry (2004) condensed these goals into three broad categories; (a) emo-
tional engagement or wanting to be ethical, (b) intellectual engagement or knowing
how to be ethical, and (c) particular knowledge or the discipline-specific knowledge
of codes or practices that allows one to make ethical decisions. More recently, Haws
(2006) called for a holistic and contextualized ethics education that would help
students develop ‘‘enactive mastery, as they encounter moral dilemma and work
through ethical deliberations’’ while being provided ‘‘vicarious experience,
encountering the moral dilemma of others with whom they identify; and expert
testimony, following those whose expertise they accept’’ (emphases original,
A Systematic Literature Review of US Engineering Ethics… 553
123
p. 365f). The ultimate desired student outcome for Haws, then, was ‘‘moral
behavior’’ (p. 366).
Like the varying learning goals, the methods through which instructors
incorporate ethics into engineering education tend to be quite diverse, ranging
from general ethics courses in domains outside of engineering to integration of
ethics content directly into engineering courses. For the most part, when led by
engineering instructors, the focus has been on professional codes and/or case studies
(Haws 2001). There are many proponents of these methods (Abaté 2011; Harris
et al. 1996) despite ‘‘little empirical research on whether the use of cases is the most
effective teaching method in promoting ethical understanding for engineering
students’’ (Yadav and Barry 2009, p. 142). Critics of these ‘‘individualistic
approaches’’ suggest the focus is too narrow (Conlon and Zandvoort 2011; Davis
2006a) and that codes restrict attention to micro-ethics issues, when the focus
should instead be on macro-ethics, or societal issues (Bucciarelli 2008; Herkert
2005). Importantly, however, is that these two areas are not separable. As Devon
and van de Poel (2004) argued, the ‘‘social [macro] ethics approach and individual
[micro] ethics approach do not exclude each other’’ as ‘‘individual ethics without
social ethics is powerless’’ (p. 468).
Haws (2004) argued beyond the micro/macro dichotomy, suggesting that
students should develop a meta-ethic by applying ethical principles within a social
context through ‘‘the negotiation of moral values’’ (p. 204). Haws’ (2004)
suggestion was that some inclusion of ethical theory is necessary, as the engineer
must have developed their own moral framework in order to solve future ethical
dilemmas, particularly those without precedent. Nonetheless, he found in his earlier
study that ethical theory was rarely included in engineering ethics education (Haws
2001). In contrast to Haws, Abaté (2011) argued that engineering ethics should not
and even cannot be taught if understood as ‘‘training engineers to be moral
individuals’’ (p. 583). Abaté’s suggestion is that morality is a character trait, and
that a stand-alone course will be insufficient to alter such ethos. Contrariwise, Haws
(2001) agreed with the difficulty of teaching ethics with the ultimate aim of moral
development, but he did not let this dissuade his regard of its importance:
Becoming morally grounded takes much more time. To enable a sense of
moral grounding in someone else requires devotion. These are not the kind of
learning objectives achieved in a few seminars, and most educators in this area
recognize that ethics, as a subject, requires a lifetime to truly master. (Haws
2001, p. 228)
Similarly, Cruz and Frey (2003) criticized Abeté’s view and its presupposition
that moral development ‘‘is over by the time children reach their early teens’’ (p.
548). These authors supported a more optimistic perspective that one’s personal
ethic continues developing later in life. Cruz and Frey’s (2003) suggestion is
supported by a long line of research using the Defining Issues Test (Rest et al.
1999, 2014). Specifically, many scholars have found that ethical interventions can
spark dramatic improvements in students’ moral judgment as measured quantita-
tively using the DIT which aligns with ‘‘neo-Kohlbergian’’ schema (Rest et al.
2000, 2014).
554 J. L. Hess, G. Fore
123
Notably, Newberry (2004), although not focusing solely on moral reasoning,
argued that engineering ethics runs the risk of being ‘‘superficially effective’’ when
the instruction has a ‘‘lack of emotional engagement with the material on part of the
students’’ (p. 343). Barry and Ohland (2012) supported these suggestions, showing
that engineering ethics is commonly in-effective. They found that exposure to ethics
content does not necessarily lead to development of sought outcomes. They
suggested that rather than focusing on quantity of exposure, instructors should focus
on the quality of instructional strategies. Newberry agreed and called for a
‘‘systematic restructuring’’ of curriculum that situates the professional/ethics
content on ‘‘equal footing’’ with the technical content (p. 348). Further, Newberry
argued that the act of ‘‘squeezing in’’ ethics content ‘‘calls into subconscious
question the legitimacy of these topics as anything other than required distractions’’
(p. 348). Despite these and many other authors’ support for ethics inclusion across
engineering education curriculum (Cruz and Frey 2003; Davis and Riley 2008;
Fleischmann 2004), engineering schools continue to struggle to implement ethics
effectively throughout their curriculum (Colby and Sullivan 2008).
Theoretical Framework
A number of assumptions guided this study’s literature retention and review
process. Namely, review articles must have described both the pedagogical process
(e.g., course content and pedagogy) and the course outcomes (e.g., evaluation or
assessment and interpretation of the pedagogical impact or research findings).
Yadav and Barry (2009) have pointed to a lack of empirical work on engineering
ethics education regarding case-based pedagogy. As case studies are one of the most
common approach to introducing ethics in engineering (Haws 2001), this limitation
likely holds for all intervention-types.
As a broad but holistic course design model for establishing the review criterion,
this study followed the operational framework offered by Streveler et al. (2012) for
outcomes based education. These scholars argued that ‘‘alignment of content (or
curriculum), assessment, and delivery (or pedagogy or instructional strategy) to
design learning modules, courses, and programs is pivotal to advancing the state of
the art of practice in engineering education.’’ Hence, in the context of this study, in
retained articles the educators must have not only described their course content and
pedagogy, but also how they assessed their teaching strategies, be it formative or
summative, quantitative or qualitative (or mixed). Simply put, authors must have
clearly described the content, pedagogy, and assessment of their intervention.
Without this clarity, comparisons of the efficacy of interventions, specifically
understanding how subtle nuances might mitigate or bolster the students’ attainment
of learning outcomes, becomes impossible (or at least inaccurate, on our part).
Therefore, while this framing indicates that researchers must be transparent
regarding how and what they teach in order to develop the needed research
foundation to ascertain which ethics interventions are most effective within
engineering, it does not elect a priori any ‘‘correct’’ method of engineering ethics
education. Further, while the authors agree that a focus on either macro-ethics
A Systematic Literature Review of US Engineering Ethics… 555
123
(Bucciarelli 2008) or meta-ethics (Haws 2004) will be more likely to catalyze
ethical reasoning development than a course that focuses solely on codes, we
recognize that other modes of ethics instruction may be more effective for other
goals, such as using role-play to cultivate an ethic of care (Pantazidou and Nair
1999). Likewise, this framing does not posit that the development or attainment of a
specific moral framework ought to be the end goal of engineering ethics education
for all instructors, as Harris et al. (1996) did not even include such a goal when
listing six common learning goals of engineering ethics education.
Lastly, there are various contrasting and overlapping definitions of ethics (Spier
and Bird 2014). Many scholars draw a rigid boundary between this term and
another, morality. For example, Davis (2006b) depicted three separate concepts that
authors frequently label under the umbrella of ethics. These include (a) ‘‘ordinary
morality’’, (b) a ‘‘field of philosophy’’, and (c) special ‘‘standards’’ that go beyond
ordinary morality (p. 718). Within the third sense is what Davis called ‘‘engineering
ethics’’ as it ‘‘applies only to members of the relevant group (engineers)’’ (p. 719).
While engineering ethics, as defined by Davis, might resemble or directly contain
aspects from the ethics of ‘‘ordinary morality’’ the ethics of engineers are generally
more stringent. This is apparent if one reviews the National Society of Professional
Engineers’ (2017) code of ethics or those from any engineering society within the
United States. While the rigid parsing made by Davis between ethics and morality
may be useful for delineating specific goals of ethics education, many engineering
educators’ efforts fit the larger umbrella term of ethics described by Davis. For
example, some authors might attempt to ground their pedagogy in philosophical
theory, an approach supported by Haws (2001). Likewise, other scholars may
simply choose to use the terms interchangeably (e.g., Drake et al. 2005). Hence,
throughout the rest of this paper, the term ethics will be used in a sense that
encompasses all distinctions made by Davis (2006b).
Methodology
This study utilized a systematic literature review process (Borrego et al. 2014;
Jesson et al. 2011) which included a qualitative content analytic approach
(Krippendorff 2012). Borrego et al. (2014) recognized this methodology was
important for appraising and critically synthesizing previous research in order to
inform future practices within that domain. Further, Borrego et al. offered a series of
steps to follow when conducting a systematic literature review, which included
(a) deciding to do a review, (b) identifying scope and research questions, (c) defining
inclusion criteria, (d) finding and cataloguing sources, (e) critiquing and appraising,
and (f) synthesizing. These systematic steps were adapted and extended for the
purposes of this investigation as follows:
1. Reviewing: Deciding to engage in a systematic literature review
2. Defining: Defining and redefining research questions and sub-questions
3. Scoping: Identifying where and how to look for literature
4. Cataloguing: Gathering literature and creating a database
556 J. L. Hess, G. Fore
123
5. Exploring: Reading each article, making notes, developing a coding frame-
work, and excluding articles that did not meet the required criterion or that
could not be coded
6. Coding: Re-reading each article and applying coding framework
7. Checking: A second coder was trained in and applied the coding framework to
five articles and the reliability between the coders was evaluated
8. Quantizing: Calculating descriptive statistics for developed categories and
comparing
9. Interpreting: Identifying what the results indicate, and tying results to the
literature
10. Narrating: Writing an overview of the research findings
While these steps are presented sequentially here, the authors’ process was not
linear. For example, ‘‘coding’’ and ‘‘checking’’ overlapped as the first author
introduced the coding framework to the second, incorporated the second coder’s
feedback by clarifying and updating his own codes, and then re-visited articles for
any adjusted codes in a form of axial coding.
Defining: The Research Questions and Sub-Questions
As described in the theoretical framework, there is a lack of empirical work related
to ethics education in engineering. Furthermore, while many accredited universities
have struggled to incorporate ethics into their curriculum (Colby and Sullivan
2008), ABET’s novel program criteria continues to emphasize ethics as a student
outcome. Hence, this study seeks to lessen instructors’ difficulties by systematically
exploring literature on ethics interventions within the United States. Specifically, the
following research question guided this investigation:
RQ: What has been the nature of engineering ethics interventions throughout post-secondary curriculum in the United States, as evident through select
journal publications describing these efforts between 2000 and 2015, and to
what extent have these interventions proved to be effective?
This research question extends beyond understanding what types of ethical
interventions permeate engineering education to focus on the content of and
research strategies used to evaluate or explore the impact of those interventions.
Therefore, to address this guiding question, secondary research questions included,
‘‘In what contexts are these ethics interventions situated?’’, ‘‘Who is leading these
interventions?’’, ‘‘What are the most common learning goals?’’, ‘‘What pedagogical
techniques have authors implemented?’’, ‘‘What was the nature of the assessment
strategies utilized?’’, and ‘‘What do findings from these studies suggest?’’ The
coding scheme developed sought to address each of these questions.
Scoping: Identifying Where and How to Look for the Literature
Literature was collected from two engineering education journals (the Journal of
Engineering Education and ADVANCES in Engineering Education) and two ethics
A Systematic Literature Review of US Engineering Ethics… 557
123
journals that include ethics interventions within engineering (Science and
Engineering Ethics and Teaching Ethics). Only U.S.-based interventions published
from 2000 to 2015 were collected. Due to this U.S. focus, reputable non-U.S.
specific journals were not included in this review.
Cataloguing: Gathering Literature and Creating a Database
The initial search strategy produced 278 hits. Through exploration of the abstracts
of collected articles, the authors retained literature that described engineering ethics
interventions, including learning objectives, pedagogical methods, and assessment.
Purely theoretical sources or those lacking assessment of learning objectives were
removed. Often, a review of the entire paper was necessary to understand if it met
the established criteria. While many papers did not meet this criterion, given the
initial number of hits, this strict criterion for literature retention was not foreseen to
be an issue. Common reasons for removing articles is described next.
First a call for a specific type of pedagogy was not retained for analysis. Hence, if
the author(s) theorized what ethics educators should do but did not provide any
empirical data, that article was removed. For example, Passino (2009) argued for a
holistic service-oriented program that seeks for students to internalize codes;
Verharen et al. (2013) described a ‘‘survival ethics’’ and service-oriented ethics
intervention; Haws (2006) described a course on just war; Hoffmann and Borenstein
(2014) described a collaborative, student-led course; Monk (2009) described the use
of plays; Prince (2006) described role-play exercises; Billington (2006) offered four
case studies; Newberry (2010) outlined how Hurricane Katrina could be used as a
case. Yet, none of these authors described the implementation of their proposed
intervention with a specific student sample, nor how they evaluated the outcomes of
their intervention.
Second, while integrating ethics into a broader course or curriculum did not
exclude a paper from this review, many papers did not provide sufficient
explanations on the course’s ethics component or their evaluation of that component
for us to apply the coding framework and, thereby, conduct a meaningful
comparative analysis. For example, Pappas et al. (2004) included one paragraph on
the ‘‘engineering ethics’’ component of the curriculum they described, and then one
sentence referring to how satisfied students were with the ethics component; Lohani
et al. (2011) described at length how ethics was integrated across the curriculum at
Virginia Tech, but summarized the impact of their intervention in two sentences;
Safferman et al. (2001) mentioned that ethics was integrated within their design
course, but exactly how was unclear.
Third, papers that only described assessment strategies were removed. For
example, Keefer et al. (2014) discussed the importance of formative assessment.
Likewise, a few papers described the design of quantitative instruments to evaluate
the efficacy of ethics interventions. Some of these even used their instrument to
evaluate classes in a pre/post format (Borenstein et al. 2010). However, such articles
were not retained as they did not provide much (if any) overview of an
intervention’s content or pedagogy.
558 J. L. Hess, G. Fore
123
Lastly, the numerous theoretical papers were not retained. To offer a few
examples, in no particular order, scholars described feminist ethics (Riley 2013),
humanitarianism (Passino 2009), macro-ethics (Herkert 2005), meta-ethics (Haws
2004), social responsibility (Doorn 2012), sustainability (Haase 2013), values
(Gupta 2015), and virtue ethics (Harris 2008). This breadth of theoretical papers is
important, as it indicates that the engineering and science education scholarly
community is actively debating what theoretical grounding is most important for
training future engineers. Furthermore, these terms might offer future insights for
exploring how educators are integrating ‘‘ethics’’ in engineering curriculum even
when they do not explicitly use the term ethics.
After this process, the database included 42 articles (see Table 1).
Exploring: Engaging with the Literature
During this phase, the authors began generating a coding framework as they read the
initially collected literature. Hence, the coding scheme was developed both
deductively and inductively. Questions from Borrego et al. (2014) guided this
process, such as, ‘‘What attempts have been commonly utilized to ascertain the
effectiveness of an intervention?’’; ‘‘How does the content of an intervention or
program influence effectiveness?’’; ‘‘Does the intensity, length, or frequency of the
intervention influence its effectiveness or duration of effect?’’; ‘‘Are there any
factors that prevent or support effective implementation?’’
Deductive codes involved pre-conceived notions of items to be included.
Examples included Haws’ (2001) findings for pedagogical nomenclature, such as:
(1) Professional engineering codes of ethics, (2) Humanist readings, (3) Theoretical
grounding, (4) Ethical heuristics, (5) Case studies, and (6) Service learning.
Likewise, three types of ethical theory were generated, following the lead of Lloyd
and Busby (2003), ‘‘(1) consequential, (2) deontological or non-consequential, and
(3) virtue-based’’ (p. 503). Contrariwise, inductively generated pedagogical codes
included presentations, peer mentoring experiences, and developing one’s own code
of ethics.
After further reading and when attempting to apply this emergent coding scheme,
several of the 42 articles either did not meet the criteria or did not provide enough
information to code the article reliably. In any cases that were particularly close, the
Table 1 Overview of data collection process
Journal Years of
publication
Initially
collected
Initially
retained
Total
analyzed
Science and Engineering Ethics 2000–2015 240 25 15
Journal of Engineering Education 2000–2012 28 12 7
Teaching Ethics 2003–2014 6 3 2
Advances in Engineering
Education
2008–2013 4 2 2
Total 2000–2015 278 42 26
A Systematic Literature Review of US Engineering Ethics… 559
123
first author consulted the second prior to removal. The analyzed literature was
reduced from 42 to 26 for two primary causes, as described next (see ‘‘Appendix’’
for a list of the 26 articles analyzed herein).
First, many articles minimally described their assessment of students’ learning of
ethics. For example, Segall (2002) described an exit interview, but how that data
was collected and analyzed was unclear; Berry et al. (2013) described plans for
future research but provided little to no information regarding how they had already
explored student learning; Lau (2004) indicated that no formal assessment had been
done; Graber and Pionke (2006) did not provide any empirical data; Mikic and
Grasso (2002) did not provide any assessment data pertaining to students’ learning
related to ethics-specific objectives.
Second, a few of the retained articles described a similar intervention, at the same
university, and facilitated by the same authors. In most of these like-articles, there
were slight modifications and a slightly different assessment style or intervention
across the manuscripts. Therefore, in order to avoid biased results favoring any
research team’s efforts, only one article was retained and coded from each like-
intervention. The rationale for retained articles was as follows:
• Chungand Alfred (2009) was retained rather than Alfred and Chung(2012) or Chung (2015) as these follow-up investigations provided little description of the pedagogy.
• Davis (2006b) was retained rather than Davis and Feinerman (2012), which described assessment but not pedagogy, or Davis and Riley (2008), which
described the assessment strategy but did not provide any empirical data.
• Jonassen and Cho (2011) was retained rather than Jonassen et al. (2009) as the former extended the findings of the later
• Hashemian and Loui (2010) was retained rather than Loui (2005) as the former included a control group and extended the findings of the latter.
• Martin et al. (2005) was retained rather than Rayne et al. (2006) as the former focused solely on undergraduates and the latter included both high school and
college students.
An initial section of the database was labeled ‘‘study overview’’. This
information was not part of the coding compared across studies, as these items
were matters of fact. For example, this section included the title of the paper, the
journal, the university/site of the course(s) described in the study, the discipline(s) of
the course listing(s), and the sample size.
Upon completion, the coding framework included nine categories with 56 binary
items, not including study overview information. Most of these items were matters
of interpretation, such as whether the learning goals fell into certain categories, the
format of the course, and the research strategies used. Hence, the validity of the
coding of these items was largely dependent upon the clarity of the author(s). As an
example, Huff and Frey (2005) created a ‘‘taxonomy’’ of cases that was modified in
this study. Most authors did not use this same terminology and hence, our attempt to
map applicable articles into these categories was a subjective process. Sometimes,
even if an article stated that they used the case study approach, they did not
articulate the content of the cases. In such instances, coding cells were left blank.
560 J. L. Hess, G. Fore
123
Table 2 presents an overview of the categories and codes. Precise definitions of the
categories and codes is provided in the quantizing section, which also includes the
results of this analysis.
Checking: Interrater Reliability
Author 1 coded each of the 26 articles using the coding framework. Throughout the
process of code creation, Author 1 frequently communicated with Author 2 in order
to clarify or add nuance to emergent codes. When Author 1 had reviewed and coded
each of the articles, Author 2 then read and coded an article from the database
(Sunderland 2014). Then, in a training session, the two authors met and reviewed
the coding framework, including the alignment between the two Authors’ coding of
the article. The Authors talked through any confusion and then made slight
adjustments to the framework. At this point, Author 1 revisited each of the coded
articles, checking his own coding. Author 2 then reviewed and coded five articles
from the database. After Author 2 coded two of these articles, the authors reviewed
their level of agreement, which was at 92.5% agreement at this stage. The authors
removed one code and rephrased a few more without significantly altering their
initial meaning. Author 2 coded the remaining articles, which led to a final inter-
rater percent agreement of 90.3% (note that Cohen’s Kappa was not computed as
this was not a fully crossed design). Lastly, the Authors discussed and resolved all
inconsistencies in their coding of the five articles.
Quantizing: Descriptive Statistics
Overview of Studies: Contexts, Curricular Integration Strategies, and Delivery Formats
The initial secondary questions addressed in this study included, ‘‘In what context
are these ethics interventions situated?’’ and ‘‘Who are leading these interventions?’’
The majority of the studies were single-university initiatives, although a few
involved multiple universities (Davis 2006b; Hirsch et al. 2005; Loui 2006;
Newberry et al. 2011). The disciplines of the course offerings were highly variable,
spanning from introductory engineering courses (Garcia et al. 2011; Jonassen and
Cho 2011), to senior design courses (Catalano 2004; Pimmel 2001; Santi 2000), to
graduate courses (Newberry et al. 2011). Some course listings were outside of
engineering, including one communications course (Moore et al. 2006) and one
physics course (Wilson 2013). Several interventions were ‘‘outside’’ of the
traditional curriculum context, such as Hirsch et al. (2005) whose study included
summer internships; Wittig (2013) who focused on extra-curricular student-
chapter projects; and Gorman et al. (2000) whose study included real-world case
exposure as part of their Systems Engineering graduate program.
Generally, the make-up of the students within these studies were from
engineering, but a few featured computer science, technology, management, or
liberal arts students (Benzley 2006; Drake et al. 2005; Feldhaus and Fox 2004;
A Systematic Literature Review of US Engineering Ethics… 561
123
Table 2 Overview of coding framework
Category Item
1. Curricular Integration Strategy Stand-alone course/unit
Within existing course
Across the curriculum
Extra-curricular
2. Class Format Online
In-person
Hybrid
3. Study Rationale or Justification ABET Accreditation
University, School, or Departmental Efforts
National Organizational Efforts
Societal Improvement
4. Study Learning Goals Sensitivity or Awareness
Judgment, Decision-Making, or Imagination
Courage, Confidence, or Commitment
5. Pedagogy or Activities Codes of Ethics or Rules
Developing Code of Ethics
Ethical Tools, Processes, or Heuristics
Developing Heuristics
Philosophical Ethics
Case Studies
Developing a Case Study
Micro-Insertion
Real-World Exposure
Community Engagement
Discussion or Debate
Presentation
Peer Mentoring
Individual Written Assignment(s)
Team Project or Position Paper
Game
6. Engagement with Philosophical Ethics (if applicable) Consequentialist (e.g., Mill)
Deontology (e.g., Kant)
Justice (e.g., Rawls)
Virtue (e.g., Aristotle)
Care (e.g., Gilligan)
7. Case Study Typology (if applicable) Historical or real
Hypothetical or fictitious
Real cases made hypothetical
Thick (lots of details)
Thin (a page or less)
Big news (rare events, macro-ethical issues)
562 J. L. Hess, G. Fore
123
Hashemian and Loui 2010; Kligyte et al. 2008). In a few instances, the disciplinary
background of students was unclear. In addition, the professorate of these studies
varied. Interventions included faculty from humanities (Moore et al. 2006),
psychology (Kligyte et al. 2008), communication (Hirsch et al. 2005), business
(Gorman et al. 2000), philosophy (Drake et al. 2005), and in one case, high school
science and math teachers (Garcia et al. 2011). The vast majority of these
interventions were required components of a curriculum or program, but often this
detail was unclear. Lastly, the duration of the interventions varied widely, with one
intervention being inserted directly into the technical curriculum (Davis 2006b),
some taking one or two days (Hall 2004; Kligyte et al. 2008; Loui 2006), and many
spanning the academic semester (Cruz et al. 2004; Ermer 2004; Garcia et al. 2011;
Hashemian and Loui 2010; Sunderland 2014).
Exactly half of the interventions were integrated within an existing course
(n = 13; 50%). Several interventions included a stand-alone course or unit,
meaning they were self-contained (n = 10, 38%). Three of the interventions were
‘‘extra-curricular’’ or outside of class. The authors only classified one intervention
as ‘‘across the curriculum’’ (Gorman et al. 2000). Most interventions were ‘‘in-
class’’ or ‘‘in-person’’ (n = 20; 77%) whereas a few were ‘‘online’’ (n = 4, 15%)
and three were ‘‘hybrid’’ in nature (n = 12%). Note that this total adds up to 27 as
one article described and compared two distinct interventions within their study
(Feldhaus and Fox 2004).
Rationale and Justification
The aim of this category was to address the secondary research question, ‘‘How did
the authors rationalize or justify the need for their study?’’ Each article began with a
Table 2 continued
Category Item
Small news (everyday, micro-ethical issues)
Evaluative (judgment)
Participative (in the case)
8. Quantitative Assessment Strategy (if applicable) Quantized qualitative data
Examination (e.g., final, mid-term, quiz)
Ethical reasoning instrument
Personality inventory or measure
Student perceptions
Productivity
Pre/post testing
Comparative (e.g., control group(s), categorically)
9. Qualitative Assessment Strategy (if applicable) Observations
Interviews or Focus Groups
Homework Analysis (e.g., written assignments)
Course Evaluation(s)
A Systematic Literature Review of US Engineering Ethics… 563
123
justification or identification of the need for the ethical intervention. To cross-
compare these rationalizations, four codes were developed: (a) ABET Accredita-
tion, (b) University, school, or departmental efforts, (c) National efforts, and
(d) Societal improvement. A fifth code eventually removed pertained to ‘‘learner
improvement’’: this code was removed as the authors felt that, at the least, it was
implicit to every article. As Table 3 shows, the majority of articles pointed to ABET
accreditation (n = 17; 65%). Exactly half of the articles referenced university,
school, or departmental efforts (n = 13; 50%). Lastly, 12 articles recognized
national efforts (46%) and 12 articles recognized societal improvement (46%) as
motivators of the intervention.
Learning Goals
This category sought to address the secondary research question, ‘‘What were the
learning goals across these interventions?’’ Several articles contained multiple
learning goals, and many of those learning goals related to but were not specific to
the domain of ethics (e.g., technical communication skills, teamwork). The coding
taxonomy included several items pertaining to these categories, each extracted from
commonly cited sources (e.g., Harris et al. 1996; Newberry 2004; Rest et al. 2014,
to cite a few). At the conclusion of the coding process, the codes were condensed
into three broad items. Descriptions of those items and the number of articles that
encapsulated elements pertaining to those items were as follows:
1. Ethical sensitivity or awareness. This learning goal focuses on enhancing
students’ awareness of ethically problematic situations or their sensitivity to
ethical issues that they may encounter in the future. It may do so by appealing to
students’ prior experiences or it may have them consider dilemmas experienced
by practicing engineers. This item was coded in 25 of the 26 articles (96%).
2. Ethical judgment, decision-making, or imagination. This learning goal focuses
on helping students know how to reason or act ethically. The objective may be
achieved in a variety of ways, such as by exposing students to, and having
students apply, codes; emphasizing the use of technical knowledge in a socially
responsible, just, or fair way; discussing ethical theory or philosophical ethics;
or promoting the creation of unforeseen possibilities. This item was coded in 23
of the 26 articles (89%).
Table 3 Overview of study rationale or justification
Item The study justifies the intervention by pointing to… n %
ABET Accreditation Accreditation requirements or student outcomes 17 65
University, School, or
Departmental Efforts
School or university efforts at promoting students’ ethical
development
13 50
National Efforts National efforts (not including ABET) calling for ethics
education in engineering
12 46
Societal Improvement Recognizing potential societal benefits of the intervention 12 46
564 J. L. Hess, G. Fore
123
3. Ethical courage, confidence, or commitment. This learning goal focuses on
students’ disposition or tendency to ‘‘be’’ ethical. It may focus on the
development of a commitment to a normative principle (e.g., fairness) or on the
students’ motivation to act ethically in their future careers. This item was coded
in 7 of the 26 articles (27%).
Pedagogy and Activities
This category addressed the secondary research question, ‘‘What pedagogical
techniques did the authors implement in order to attain the ethics-related learning
goals?’’ This category included 16 items, which was the most items included within
any category (see Table 4).
Several items were taken directly from Haws (2001), such as codes or rules
(n = 22; 85%), case study exposure (n = 21; 81%), ethical heuristics (n = 12;
46%), philosophical ethics (what Haws called theoretical grounding; n = 11; 42%),
and community engagement (which was related to what Haws called service
learning; n = 2; 8%). Inductively generated codes included discussion or debate
(n = 20; 77%), individual written assignments (n = 14; 54%), team projects
(n = 10; 38%), peer mentoring (n = 3; 12%), micro-insertion (n = 2; 8%), game-
based pedagogy (n = 2; 8%), and real-world exposure (n = 2; 8%). Lastly, several
items were distinguished by an emphasis on students’ development of an above
item, such as having students develop their own case studies (n = 3; 12%), ethical
heuristics, (n = 3; 12%), or codes/rules (n = 2; 8%). Only a few of these
pedagogical methods were included within more than half of the interventions. In
order of prevalence, these included codes or rules, case studies, discussion or
debate, and individual writing exercises. Table 4 summarizes these results.
Philosophical Ethics
11 of the 26 articles had students engage with philosophical ethics. The following
secondary research question guided the coding process within this category, ‘‘If the
authors grounded their pedagogy in some philosophical/theoretical theory, with
which theories did they have their students engage?’’ Items were developed as the
authors reviewed theoretical papers that did not feature an ethical intervention. In
total, this category contained five items. Articles were coded if they simply
mentioned student engagement with philosophical theory; rarely did authors
articulate how they had students do so. Importantly, if an article simply described
ethical theory within its theoretical framework but not student engagement with
ethical theory, this was not coded. For example, Sunderland’s (2014) study was
grounded within an ethic of care, but the intervention did not appear to engage
students with an ethic of care at a theoretical level. The most common ethical
theories integrated into the courses were consequentialism (n = 6; 23%), deontol-
ogy (n = 5; 19%), justice (n = 5; 19%), and virtue (n = 3; 12%). No articles had
students engage with an ethic of care at a theoretical level. Table 5 provides an
overview of these results.
A Systematic Literature Review of US Engineering Ethics… 565
123
Case Study Typology
This section addresses the question, ‘‘If the authors used a case-based pedagogical
approach, what was the nature of the cases that they utilized?’’ 21 of the 26 articles
used case studies. The analysis of case content followed the work of Huff and Frey
(2005) who offered five dichotomous variables for defining case types. These
included (a) historical versus hypothetical, (b) thick versus thin, (c) good news
versus bad news, (d) big news versus small news, and (e) evaluative versus
participative. During the coding process, the authors removed the good versus bad
criteria as almost every article featured ‘‘bad’’ news cases, and in many instances,
there was what seemed to be ‘‘neutral’’ cases. Rarely did authors describe what Huff
and Frey called ‘‘good’’ cases featuring moral exemplars. Notably, many of the
articles featured multiple case studies. Cruz et al. (2004) were at the high end with
Table 4 Overview of pedagogical strategies utilized
Item Students learn by…. n %
Codes or rules Reviewing codes of ethics or standards, such as
the National Society of Professional
Engineers’ (NSPE) code of ethics
22 85
Case study exposure Engaging with ethical case studies 21 81
Discussion or debate Discussing ethical issues in class or out of class
amongst their peers
20 77
Individual written
assignments
Individually, writing a paper of any length on an
ethical topic or issue (e.g., position or paper;
essay)
14 54
Ethical tools, processes, or
heuristics
Reviewing and applying an ethical decision-
making or reasoning process
12 46
Philosophical ethics Engaging with philosophical ethics or ethical
theories (e.g., Kant, Mill)
11 42
Team project/position
paper
As part of a team, writing a paper or engaging in
a project that features an ethics component
10 38
Presentation Presenting research, case, or position on an
ethics topic (e.g., position in a case study)
7 27
Peer mentoring Coaching or leading peer in ethics debate,
research, or on a project
3 12
Developing heuristics Developing their own decision-making process 3 12
Developing a case study Developing a case study 3 12
Micro-insertion Experiencing ethics embedded directly with
technical curricular content
2 8
Real-world exposure Engaging with ethical issues in practice 2 8
Community engagement Engaging with ethical issues that they encounter
during community-based learning
2 8
Developing code of ethics Developing one’s own code of ethics, ethical
rules, or ethics standards
2 8
Game Playing game(s) to learn about or work through
ethics issues
2 8
566 J. L. Hess, G. Fore
123
as many as 15 cases integrated into their intervention (an ‘‘Ethics bowl’’), whereas
Wilson (2013) and Loui (2006) were each at the low end with just one case. As an
example of the thin/thick distinction, the authors coded both of these articles as
‘‘thick’’, although Loui’s case included about an hour of work compared to Wilson’s
case that included a month of student work/activities.
As Table 6 shows, the type of cases described across interventions were highly
variable. Only one item (‘‘Participative’’) was contained within more than half of
the 21 articles that featured cases. Importantly, in many of the articles it was unclear
what the nature of the case-based pedagogy was. In other words, some authors
would indicate that they use case studies, and some would even mention the case,
but they would not provide additional information on how they delivered the case.
Hence, perhaps unsurprisingly, this category was one of the larger sources of inter-
rater disagreements.
Table 5 Overview of interventions where students engaged with philosophical ethics
Item Students learn by engaging with or applying… n %
Consequentialist
(e.g., Mill)
Consequentialist lines of thought (e.g., utilitarianism or the greatest good
for the greatest number)
6 23
Deontology (e.g.,
Kant)
Deontological reasoning (e.g., categorical imperatives or binding moral
obligations)
5 19
Justice (e.g., Rawls) Issues with equity (e.g., the fairness principle) 5 19
Virtue (e.g.,
Aristotle)
Character-related inquiry (e.g., moral standards) 3 12
Care (e.g., Gilligan) An ethic of care (e.g., connectedness; compassion) 0 0
Table 6 Overview of case-based pedagogies
Item Description n %
Historical or real Based on actual or true events 8 31
Hypothetical or fictitious The events are not true 7 27
Real cases made hypothetical Reframing a real case so that it becomes fictional 4 15
Thick (lots of details) The inclusion of lots of material 6 23
Thin (a page or less) Providing a page of information or less 7 27
Big news (rare events, macro-
ethical issues)
Featuring newspaper-worthy material; Or featuring macro
issues involve many stakeholders
8 31
Small news (everyday, micro-
ethical issues)
Featuring everyday ethical issues or micro-ethical issues that
focus on interpersonal issues
8 31
Evaluative Thinking about the case as would a judge 6 23
Participative Thinking about the case as a participant 12 46
A Systematic Literature Review of US Engineering Ethics… 567
123
Quantitative Assessments
25 of the 26 articles used some form of quantitative data to inform their results. The
following secondary research question guided the exploration of these assessments,
‘‘What was the nature of the quantitative assessment strategies utilized throughout
the interventions?’’ The most common quantitative assessment technique analyzed
student perceptions of the intervention (n = 19; 73%). Exactly half of the
interventions featured a comparative component, which could have included either
a control group or a comparison of distinct interventions. Only a few studies (n = 4;
15%) utilized an ethical reasoning instrument, such as the DIT2 (Rest et al. 1999) or
ESIT (Borenstein et al. 2010). Table 7 provides an overview of these results.
Qualitative Assessments
16 of the 26 articles used some form of qualitative data to inform their results. The
following research question guided this analysis, ‘‘What was the nature of the
qualitative assessment strategies utilized throughout the interventions?’’ Notably,
authors rarely articulated the epistemological theory guiding their qualitative
analysis. Nonetheless, items were coded if an author provided any data pertaining to
the respective item. The most common qualitative assessment technique was course
evaluations (n = 12; 46%) followed by observations (n = 8; 31%). Table 8
provides an overview of these results.
Literature Exemplars
To elucidate the nature of and variability across the analyzed articles, this section
briefly describes four exemplary works. Specifically, these four articles highlight
unique methods for delivering ethics instruction and ascertaining the efficacy of that
Table 7 Overview of quantitative assessment, evaluation, or research strategies used
Item The article measured and analyzed… n %
Student perceptions Perceptions of the efficacy of the intervention, such as through course
evaluations
19 73
Comparative Comparative data, such as with control groups or by comparing
intervention types
13 50
Quantized qualitative
data
Qualitative data that they converted to numerical data, either by coding
or applying a rubric
9 35
Pre/post testing Ethical development through pre and post intervention testing 8 31
Ethical reasoning
instrument
Affinity for post-conventional reasoning by using measures such as the
DIT2 or ESIT
4 15
Examination End of course evaluation, such as a test or quiz 3 12
Personality measure Students’ affinity for certain ways of thinking 1 4
Productivity Students’ productivity (e.g., manuscripts; presentations) 1 4
568 J. L. Hess, G. Fore
123
instruction. Further, the following passages were intended to provide the reader with
an understanding as to how the authors coded the articles. Table 9 provides an
overview of the exemplary articles.
Exemplar 1: Problem Based-Learning and Ethics Instruction (Wittig 2013)
This article was selected as it describes how educators can incorporate ethics into
design-based pedagogy. Specifically, this paper identifies how Problem Based
Learning strategies align with traditional student-chapter led or ‘‘extra-curricular’’
Engineers Without Borders (EWB) projects. In the context of this analysis, Wittig’s
goals aligned with the ‘‘ethical sensitivity’’ and ‘‘ethical decision-making’’ learning
goals. The pedagogical activities coded included real-world work, community
engagement, discussion/debate, mentoring, and a team project. Philosophical ethics
and case studies were not components of this intervention.
This article used both quantitative and qualitative techniques to assess how EWB
participation influenced students’ perceptions of their attainment of ABET EC 2000
student outcomes when compared to their coursework. Specifically, Wittig
compared differences in students’ perceptions of the impact of the two educational
modes across ABET outcomes. Of the ‘‘technical’’ ABET outcomes, the most
dramatic differences were between students’ perceptions of ‘‘their progress towards
achievement’’ aligned with outcome c (‘‘design a system, component, or process to
meet desired needs with realistic constraints such as…’’). The two ‘‘non-technical’’
Table 8 Overview of qualitative assessment, evaluation, or research strategies used
Item The article gathered and analyzed… n %
Course Evaluations Post-course evaluations reflecting on learning gains, engagement with
pedagogy, or satisfaction
12 46
Observations Observation of student learning gains either within or outside of course
(e.g., at a conference)
8 31
Interviews or Focus
Groups
Students’ narrative accounts of their learning or how they would reason
through a case
4 15
Homework Analysis Students’ written assignments or projects 3 12
Table 9 Overview of literature exemplars
References Student discipline Duration
Wittig (2013) Civil, Mechanical, or Environmental More than a year
Hashemian and Loui
(2010)
Electrical/Computer Engineers One semester
Kligyte et al. (2008) Electrical/Computer Engineers; Computer Science;
Meteorology
Two days
Davis (2006b) Multiple Directly within
courses
A Systematic Literature Review of US Engineering Ethics… 569
123
outcomes with the most marked distinctions were f and h. With respect to outcome f
(‘‘possess an understanding of professional and ethical responsibility’’), on a Likert-
type scale from 1 (not relevant) to 5 (very helpful), the 14 students responded with
an average of 4.5 and 3.6 to EWB and class-impacts, respectively. Equally disparate
perceptions surfaced when comparing students’ perceptions of EWB and class
impacts regarding ABET outcome h (‘‘possess the broad education necessary to
understand the impact of engineering solutions’’), with averages of 4.8 and 3.7,
respectively.
This paper serves as an exemplar in several ways. Firstly, ethical development
was not Wittig’s sole focus, but rather one among many. Nonetheless, the findings
indicated that students’ perceived their extra-curricular involvement to be especially
beneficial in terms of their ethical development. Second, it serves as one of two
community-engaged approaches to ethics education that were analyzed. Service
learning is often ‘‘problem-based’’ and challenges students to work through ill-
structured problems tied to their authentic experiences. In these contexts, the
educator often becomes a facilitator or mentor to the students, who work with and
challenge one other. As Wittig makes clear, these contexts provide critical
opportunities for integrating ethics into engineering curricula.
Exemplar 2: Qualitatively Investigating Course Efficacy (Hashemian and Loui 2010)
This article was selected as it offered the most in-depth qualitative analysis of all of
the analyzed articles. The study describes a 200-level elective course, Engineering
Ethics, offered within Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of
Illinois at Urbana Champaign. The focus of the course, as explained by the authors,
was on ‘‘professional ethics in engineering, including professional responsibility,
conflict of interest, confidentiality, safety and risk, relationships between managers
and engineers, whistle-blowing, and codes of ethics’’ (p. 203). Several items were
selected within the pedagogy category, including codes of ethics; heuristics; case
studies; and individual position papers. Hashemian and Loui did not clearly present
students with ethical theory, nor was the nature of the case studies entirely clear (we
coded ‘‘big news’’).
The unique part of this study was not so much the course but rather the assessment
strategy utilized by the authors for ascertaining the course’s effect on student
outcomes. The authors interviewed 18 students total, including six students who had
taken the course, six prospective students, and six students who had not taken nor
enrolled in the course. In interviews, the authors first had each student portray how they
viewed the professional responsibilities of engineers and, second, they had students
reason through two case studies. Thematically, the authors coded the interview
transcripts and then compared themes across student groups. Their findings indicated
that students within their course were better prepared to think about how to best act on
the case details (hence, an increase in ethical judgment) as well as to recognize moral
problems (hence, an increase in ethical sensitivity). However, the course appeared to
have a vacillating influence on students’ commitment to act on the case details (hence,
some but not all students showed heightened ethical commitment).
570 J. L. Hess, G. Fore
123
Exemplar 3: A Cross-Disciplinary Ethical Decision-Making Heuristic (Kligyte et al. 2008)
This article was selected as it describes a novel strategy to Responsible Conduct of
Research that spans both the engineering and science disciplinary contexts,
psychology instructors led the intervention, and the authors incorporated numerous
pedagogical techniques. Specifically, the intervention consisted of 10 modules
implemented over two days. We coded the items codes or rules, case studies,
heuristics, and discussions. Kligyte et al. outlined the varying learning objectives in
detail (sensitivity, judgment, and awareness were coded in this study) as well as the
content of each module. Further, the authors provided an extensive outline of an
ethical-decision making model that focused on metacognitive reasoning strategies
for recognizing potential reasoning errors. These steps included (as written on
p. 255):
1. ‘‘Recognizing one’s circumstances’’;
2. ‘‘Seeking outside help’’;
3. ‘‘Questioning one’s own and others’ judgment’’
4. ‘‘Dealing with emotions’’;
5. ‘‘Anticipating consequences of actions’’;
6. ‘‘Looking within by analyzing personal motivations’’;
7. ‘‘Considering others’ perspectives’’
The participants in the intervention were part of a research center and included 22
graduate students, 3 post-doctoral researchers, 2 faculty members, and 2 research
scientists. The authors utilized a variety of validated instruments in conjunction with
the development of their own instrumentation for understanding course impact.
Validated measures included personality instruments, such as the Big Five
Inventory, the Work Profile Questionnaire, and the Balanced Inventory of Desirable
Responding. Their self-developed instrument had students respond to pre-provided
multiple-choice answers within a series of 12 ethical scenarios. Using these
responses, the authors coded for participants’ decision-making abilities as well as
their meta-cognitive reasoning strategies. The authors implemented this instrument
pre and post course and compared responses. Their findings indicated that the
learners markedly improved in several categories, including their propensities for
questioning judgment and dealing with emotions. Conversely, participants showed a
marked decline in ‘‘seeking help.’’ In addition to these procedures, the authors
explored the mitigating influence of several variables, such as previous ethics
training and participants’ perceived importance of ethics training.
Exemplar 4: Integrating Ethics Directly into the Technical Curriculum (Davis 2006b)
This case was selected as the author provides an extensive outline and conceptual
portrayal of the term ‘‘ethics’’ (this distinction was discussed in the theoretical
framework). Further, Davis describes a strategy for embedding ethics instruction
A Systematic Literature Review of US Engineering Ethics… 571
123
into technical courses which requires virtually no changes in engineering
curriculum. All three learning goals were coded in the analysis of this article,
although Davis recognized four potential outcomes of ethics instruction in
engineering. These included ‘‘improved ethical sensitivity’’; ‘‘improved knowledge
of relevant standards of conduct’’; ‘‘improved ethical judgment’’; and ‘‘improved
ethical will-power’’ (in our analysis, Davis’s second and third goals were reduced
into one larger item). Davis noted that will-power is difficult to assess, but he
posited that improving the first three would ultimately lead to the fourth.
Micro-insertion may be as simple as reframing a technical problem so that
students may come to multiple solutions. The challenge for the student then
becomes making and justifying a decision among competing solutions. This has the
added benefit of taking an abstract problem and making it realistic. For example,
Davis expanded a thermodynamics problem where students calculate coefficients of
performance of two refrigerants with the added calculation of cost. In the revised
problem, students must decide which refrigerant is better by balancing the
environmental impacts with respect to costs. Further, Davis provides a few
sentences that an instructor could state in less than a minute in their class during
instruction. Davis makes the bold claim that incorporating micro-level efforts such
as these across the curriculum will be more beneficial than spending one day on
ethics in a course. However, he cautions that this method is ‘‘unlikely to create an
expert in the ethics of engineering’’ (p. 729). He does not claim that this pedagogical
method should necessarily supplant all other interventions, but rather that it has the
benefit of heightening students’ awareness of the pervasiveness of ethical issues
within engineering. The study does not explore these claims but rather focuses
solely on learners’ perceptions of the efficacy of the intervention (with mostly
favorable responses).
Discussion: Interpreting and Narrating
Purpose of Engineering Ethics Instruction
The majority of the 26 analyzed articles (see ‘‘Appendix’’) justified their study by
referencing or acknowledging ABET accreditation. In one article, students’
perceptions of the intervention’s impact with respect to ABET outcomes was the
primary evaluation metric (Wittig 2013). Hence, it is apparent that what is included
within ABET is a particularly powerful force for promoting the integration of any
topic, including ethics, within engineering curriculum. At the time of this writing,
ABET’s proposed metrics for the 2017–2018 academic year (the first dramatic
changes to the student outcomes since 2000) were written as ‘‘an understanding of
professional and ethical responsibility.’’ Notably, this aligns with the most common
learning goal described across studies, ethical awareness or sensitivity.
Taking a step back, however, identifying the purpose of engineering ethics
instruction requires that one conceptualizes the term ethics. In the theoretical
framework, this study adopted a broad framing of this phenomenon. However,
Davis (2006b) offered a more concrete definition that was specific to the context of
572 J. L. Hess, G. Fore
123
engineering. Davis argued that engineering ethics involves an understanding and
commitment to the special standards that are unique to the field of engineering. This
is not to say that Davis felt other aspects of ‘‘ethics’’ (e.g., philosophical ethics)
were unimportant, but rather that certain aspects ethics were particularly important
for engineers. Developing students’ understanding of these special obligations and
standards is likely the baseline for acceptable ethics instruction for ABET
accreditation. For example, by developing an online simulator for ethics instruction
to help students recall the NSPE code of ethics, Chung and Alfred’s (2009)
intervention appears to meet ABET EC2000 student outcome f. In other words,
instructional strategies designed to encourage code internalization or memorization
can arguably cover the outcome, ‘‘understanding of professional and ethical
responsibility.’’ To evaluate their online simulator, Chung and Alfred compared two
groups of students’ pre and post scores on 20 questions pertaining to the NSPE code
of ethics. The control group perused the NSPE website while the experimental
group received instruction through a simulator designed by the researchers. They
found that the intervention was significantly more influential for the experimental
group. If an understanding of ethical codes is the only goal, then Chung and Alfred’s
intervention provides a sufficient pedagogical innovation for engineering educators.
However, a learning goal that was nearly as common as ethical sensitivity or
understanding was ethical judgment, reasoning, or imagination, suggesting that
engineering educators commonly expect more than memorization or internalization;
they also expect students to be capable of informed ethical practice. Often, authors
addressed this learning goal by having students utilize codes (such as those
described by NSPE) to reason through case studies. Yet, in nearly half of the
articles, teachers addressed this learning goal by utilizing ethical heuristics or
philosophical ethics. Certainly, having a knowledge of ethical codes can enable one
to make decisions in light of those codes. However, oftentimes the applicability of
codes is uncertain, particularly in unprecedented contexts (Beever and Brightman
2016; Davis 1991). It is in these contexts that we would argue, in unison with Haws
(2001), that enabling students to ground their decisions with respect to ethical
theory becomes particularly important.
Lastly, a few scholars explicitly focused on ethical commitment. Admittedly,
Davis (2006b) recognized that understanding might lead to reasoning and, in turn,
commitment (or what Davis called willpower). As he phrased the thought
experiment: ‘‘Consider: Is not an engineer who knows that he shares with other
engineers a commitment to a particular standard of conduct more likely to follow it
than one who believes himself alone in that commitment?’’ (p. 721) In essence,
Davis was proposing that understanding established codes that have been
recognized by professionals across the field can allow students to reason with the
support of the whole set of professionals behind them, and that this ought to enhance
their commitment or will power, as well. Further, despite Davis’s design and
implementation of micro-insertions, he still felt that other instructional methods
(e.g., philosophical ethics) were important aspects of ethics instruction. Nonethe-
less, we find it surprising that so few articles explicitly focus on commitment given
that nearly half of the studies justified their intervention by describing its potential
for societal improvement.
A Systematic Literature Review of US Engineering Ethics… 573
123
Pedagogical Trends and Suggestions
This section argues in favor of a greater inclusion of less commonly utilized
instructional strategies which have the potential to introduce students to additional
fundamental components of ethics, thereby contributing to their development of a
more holistic conceptualization of engineering ethics. In solidarity with Davis
(2006b), we argue that integrating micro-insertions of ethics across the engineering
curriculum may be preferable to other strategies, such as a single unit on ethics or
even a separate course. Exactly half of the 26 articles involved interventions where
the authors integrated an ethics unit into an existing course, although this integration
was only in a form akin to ‘‘micro-insertions’’ twice. ‘‘Ethics’’ should not be
resigned to its own bounded silo. Rather, ethical potential is arguably present within
every event (see Lambek 2010; Lambek et al. 2015) and, therefore, could be
seamlessly integrated while students practice and perfect their technical knowledge
and skills. Teaching through authentic engineering experiences (e.g., problem-based
or community-engaged pedagogies) may provide particularly unique contexts for
this integration. For example, community-engaged pedagogy can provide the means
to situate engineering students in authentic, real-world ethical situations.
Scholars have identified the community-engaged pedagogical approach as an
evidence-based modality for developing particular expressions of ethical and moral
being (Boss 1994; Gorman et al. 1994), such as in terms of civic-mindedness
(Steinberg et al. 2011) and empathic formation (Zoltowski et al. 2012). Community-
engaged pedagogy also has been shown to contribute to gains in student content
knowledge (Eyler et al. 2001; Furco and Root 2010) and, in one study of an
introductory engineering course, an increase in ABET EC2000 program outcomes c,
e, and k (Sevier et al. 2012). Wittig’s (2013) work, discussed in the literature
exemplars section, also supports the benefits of such a pedagogical approach.
Moreover, scholars only utilized community engagement and real-world exposure
in 8% of our sample. Hence, this is a significant gap where more interventions
coupled with rigorous research are needed.
Real-world pedagogical strategies, or those involving student engagement with
stakeholders beyond the classroom, could also provide new avenues for exploring an
ethic of care within engineering curriculum (Gilligan 1982; Pantazidou and Nair
1999). Engineering here includes an element of empathy and care for, and considered
connection to, the differences one encounters as a professional (Strobel et al. 2013;
Hess et al. 2016; Walther et al. 2017). By definition, a course reliant on authentic
engineering experiences would also include a problem and a client, and in such
contexts, course participants must negotiate relationships. Helping students foster an
ethic of care can help ensure that students truly, rather than superficially, connect with
and, thereby, accurately (or at least somewhat accurately) understand users. Further,
having students reflect on their own as well as others’ emotions will help establish a
relational connectivity between different actors. In turn, this connectivity could help
students ‘‘reimagine the design process from a community-based perspective’’
(Pantazidou and Nair 1999, paraphrased in Sunderland 2014, p. 186). Specifically, a
community-engaged pedagogy could provide the ideal educational environment for
students to consider, apply, and reflect on an ethic of care. In these contexts, students
574 J. L. Hess, G. Fore
123
encounter a diversity of interests, desires, needs, and values that they must reconcile in
order to create complex designs representative of this diverse assemblage of design
elements. In other words, the final design or fabrication represents a unification of the
multiplicity of values present in the engineering problem.
Evaluation Considerations
Our synthesis of the collected articles indicated that scholars have used a wide variety
of approaches to evaluate the efficacy of their ethics instruction. In all but one instance,
the authors collected and analyzed quantitative data. More specifically, in nearly three
quarters of the articles the authors relied on student perceptions to understand the
efficacy of their instruction. In contrast, roughly 30% of articles utilized pre/post
testing, 15% of the articles utilized some measure of ethical reasoning, and 12% used
examinations developed by the authors. While students’ perceptions of their learning
can be important indicators of their course satisfaction, scholars have shown that this
measure may not be the best predictor of students’ ethical development (Holsapple
et al. 2011). Further, given the wide variation in assessment measures, it appears that
best practices for evaluating ethics instruction need to be agreed upon throughout this
scholarly community (an endeavor being pursued to some extent already, e.g., see
Herkert et al.’s 2015 work on the Online Ethics Center). In doing so, comparing
interventions with respect to one another will become more feasible, and in turn,
findings across studies will become more comparably insightful.
In more than half of the articles, the authors used qualitative data to inform their
findings. The majority of these forms of evaluation included students’ written
responses at the end of the course. Importantly, the majority of the articles did not
describe their theoretical framing or methodological procedures to the depth
described by Hashemian and Loui (2010). Rather, several of these articles referred
to their classroom observations as anecdotal or preliminary. Perhaps this is due to
the time constraints of implementing a rigorous qualitative evaluation of an
intervention, or perhaps, like with quantitative methods, qualitative techniques for
understanding the impact of ethics instruction are needed (e.g., in the form of
rubrics). In contrast, this finding might correlate with an oft-cited bias of
engineering instructors in favor of quantitative methods that align with positivistic
or post-positivistic research paradigms (Baillie and Douglas 2014). We would
encourage more scholars to identify and utilize qualitative methods to explore
ethical becoming within the context of engineering education.
In sum, this systematic literature review indicates that there is a limited body of
knowledge on the impact of ethics instruction within the context of engineering in
the U.S. While there are numerous articles on assessment or ethical theory in
isolation, this analysis found a relatively small amount of research-on-practice.
Roughly 15% of the literature sieved through was categorized as such. Even within
these articles, it was often difficult to characterize the nature of the intervention.
This was especially true when attempting to apply the case study typology to the
literature. The challenges faced in this analysis call to mind several considerations
that scholars ought to engage into improve the collective negotiation regarding the
‘‘means’’ and ‘‘ends’’ of ethics instruction (Spier and Bird 2014: 2).
A Systematic Literature Review of US Engineering Ethics… 575
123
First, ethics instructors and scholars must become more transparent when
describing how they delivered their instruction, and ethics reviewers and editors
must encourage this transparency throughout the peer-review process. Second,
scholars must explicitly state their learning objectives (perhaps mapped to the learning
goals described herein or those described by others, such as Newberry 2004 or Harris
et al. 1996). Third, appropriate assessment measures must be used to ascertain the
extent to which students met the learning objectives. For example, if the instructional
goal involves moral reasoning, existing instruments can and potentially should be used
to ascertain the impact of ethics instruction on students’ moral or ethical reasoning
skills. In the analyzed articles, Drake et al. (2005) utilized the DIT2 (Rest et al. 1999)
and Wilson (2013) utilized the ESIT (Borenstein et al. 2010). In contrast, Kligyte et al.
(2008) developed their own measure. While such efforts are laborious and time-
intensive, they are critically needed for moving this field forward. Lastly, educators
and scholars should consider creative avenues for disseminating results, thereby
incorporating all relevant stakeholders into the conversation regarding the best
methods for integrating ethics into one’s local context.
Conclusion
This study indicated that there is a limited amount of empirical work on ethics
education in engineering higher education, specifically across the U.S. Yet, all
engineering education involves ethics due to the ill-structured nature of engineering
problems. Course by course, learning objectives guide students towards what the
leading instructor(s) define as valuable knowledge. Either including or excluding a
concerted focus on ethics instruction sends the signal to students that ethics either is
or is not important. Further, this study does discern ‘‘best practices’’ for ethics
educators. While this objective framed this study at the outset, ascertaining best
practices was difficult due to the large variation in approaches and evaluation
methods utilized across the 26 articles analyzed. Due to this variation, ethics
educators must be more specific about several aspects in their future scholarly work.
First, educators must clearly define what they mean by ethics. Second, educators
must set learning goals and share those in their reporting of results. Third, scholars
must provide acceptable evidence to convince the community that their pedagogy is
effective with respect to the stated learning goals. Lastly, scholars should consider
creative outlets for displaying the content of their pedagogy both nationally, such as
sharing resources on the Online Ethics Center, and locally, such as reaching out to
fellow departments or schools or collaborating with student-centered and commu-
nity-focused non-profit organizations.
Limitations
First, scholars are conducting research on ethical interventions within engineering
across the world. However, to generalize to the U.S. context, this study focused only
on U.S. efforts. A few studies have made global comparisons. For example, Cao
576 J. L. Hess, G. Fore
123
(2015) compared U.S. and Chinese ethics pedagogy; Downey et al. (2007)
compared ethics interventions in U.S., Japanese, and European contexts; and Steele
et al. (2016) compared the impact of ethics training between US and international
students. Second, these articles were all published within journals, and therefore
these are primarily interventions that were successful, which leads to a potentially
problematic bias within the dataset (Borrego et al. 2014). Third, there are ethics
interventions that have not been included within this review which are accessible in
conference proceedings (e.g., Canary and Herkert 2013; Kisselburgh et al. 2016)
and other journals, so the authors cannot and do not claim ultimately generaliz-
ability of these findings. Fourth, it is possible that non-coded items were
components of courses described in a study. For example, in one of the analyzed
articles, only ‘‘big news’’ was coded, but in a personal communication one of the
study’s authors indicated that the course also utilized ‘‘small news’’ cases.
Nonetheless, we would not perceive this as an issue with this study’s methodology,
but rather support for the suggestion that scholars be more explicit when describing
their pedagogical approach when disseminating their findings. Lastly, while there
was little theoretical description of how instructors embedded philosophical ethics
into their instruction, this is not to suggest that philosophy has not been incorporated
in engineering curriculum. This is evident if one considers the tremendous amount
of theoretical papers cited in the cataloguing section of this paper. Indeed, future
scholars might similarly synthesize these works. Such insights could indicate the
agreement among engineering ethicists of the most salient theoretical grounding for
ethics education in engineering.
Appendix
See Table 10.
Table 10 List of coded literature
References Title Journal
Benzley (2006) The Small Helm Project: An Academic Activity
Addressing International Corruption for
Undergraduate Civil Engineering and
Construction Management Students
Sci Eng Ethics
Bero and Kuhlman (2011) Teaching Ethics to Engineers: Ethical Decision
Making Parallels the Engineering Design Process
Sci Eng Ethics
Brummel et al. (2010) Development of Role-Play Scenarios for Teaching
Responsible Conduct of Research
Sci Eng Ethics
Catalano (2004) Senior Capstone Design and Ethics: A Bridge to the
Professional World
Sci Eng Ethics
Chung and Alfred (2009) Design, Development, and Evaluation of an
Interactive Simulator for Engineering Ethics
Education (SEEE)
Sci Eng Ethics
Cruz et al. (2004) The Ethics Bowl in Engineering Ethics at the
University of Puerto Rico-Mayaguez
Teaching Ethics
A Systematic Literature Review of US Engineering Ethics… 577
123
Table 10 continued
References Title Journal
Davis (2006b) Integrating Ethics into Technical Courses: Micro-
Insertion
Sci Eng Ethics
Drake et al. (2005) Engineering Ethical Curricula: Assessment and
Comparison of Two Approaches
JEE
Ermer (2004) Using Case Studies to Teaching Engineering Ethics
and Professionalism
Teaching Ethics
Feldhaus and Fox (2004) Effectiveness of an Ethics Course Delivered in
Traditional and Non-Traditional Formats
Sci Eng Ethics
Garcia et al. (2011) An Innovative Project and Design Oriented
Electrical Engineering Curriculum at the
University of North Texas
ADVANCES
Gorman et al. (2000) Integrating Ethics & Engineering: A Graduate
Option in Systems Engineering, Ethics, and
Technology Studies
JEE
Hall (2004) Student Development and Ownership of Ethical and
Professional Standards
Sci Eng Ethics
Hashemian and Loui (2010) Can Instruction in Engineering Ethics Change
Students’ Feelings about Professional
Responsibility?
Sci Eng Ethics
Hirsch et al. (2005) Enhancing Core Competency Learning in an
Integrated Summer Research Experience for
Bioengineers
JEE
Jonassen and Cho (2011) Fostering Argumentation While Solving
Engineering Ethics Problems
JEE
Kligyte et al. (2008) Application of a Sensemaking Approach to Ethics
Training in the Physical Sciences and Engineering
Sci Eng Ethics
Loui (2006) Assessment of an Engineering Ethics Video:
Incident at Morales
JEE
Martin et al. (2005) Teaching for Adaptive Expertise in Biomedical
Engineering Ethics
Sci Eng Ethics
Moore et al. (2006) PRiME: Integrating Professional Responsibility into
the Engineering Curriculum
Sci Eng Ethics
Newberry et al. (2011) Acclimating International Graduate Students to
Professional Engineering Ethics
Sci Eng Ethics
Pimmel (2001) Cooperative Learning Instructional Activities in a
Capstone Design Course
JEE
Santi (2000) Ethics Exercises for Civil, Environmental, and
Geological Engineers
JEE
Sunderland (2014) Taking Emotion Seriously: Meeting Students Where
They Are
Sci Eng Ethics
Wilson (2013) Using the Chernobyl Incident to Teach Engineering
Ethics
Sci Eng Ethics
Wittig (2013) Implementing Problem Based Learning through
Engineers Without Borders Student Projects
ADVANCES
578 J. L. Hess, G. Fore
123
References
Abaté, C. (2011). Should engineering ethics be taught? Science and Engineering Ethics, 17(3), 583–596.
ABET. (2016). Rationale for revising criteria 3. Retrieved March 7, 2017 from http://www.abet.org/
accreditation/accreditation-criteria/accreditation-alerts/rationale-for-revising-criteria-3/.
Alfred, M., & Chung, C. A. (2012). Design, development, and evaluation of a second generation
interactive simulator for engineering ethics dducation (SEEE2). Science and Engineering Ethics,
18(4), 689–697.
Baillie, C., & Douglas, E. P. (2014). Confusions and conventions: Qualitative research in engineering
education. Journal of Engineering Education, 103(1), 1–7.
Barry, B. E., & Ohland, M. W. (2012). ABET Criterion 3.f: How much curriculum content is enough?
Science and Engineering Ethics, 18(2), 369–392.
Beever, J., & Brightman, A. O. (2016). Reflexive principlism as an effective approach for developing
ethical reasoning in engineering. Science and Engineering Ethics, 22(1), 275–291.
Benzley, S. E. (2006). The small helm project: An academic activity addressing international corruption
for undergraduate civil engineering and construction management students. Science and Engineer-
ing Ethics, 12(2), 355–363.
Bero, K., & Kuhlman, A. (2011). Teaching ethics to engineers: Ethical decision making parallels the
engineering design process. Science and Engineering Ethics, 17(3), 597–605.
Berry, R. M., Borenstein, J., & Butera, R. J. (2013). Contentious problems in bioscience and
biotechnology: A pilot study of an approach to ethics education. Science and Engineering Ethics,
19(2), 653–668.
Billington, D. P. (2006). Teaching ethics in engineering education through historical analysis. Science
and Engineering Ethics, 12(2), 205–222.
Borenstein, J., Drake, M. J., Kirkman, R., & Swann, J. L. (2010). The Engineering and Science Issues
Test (ESIT): A discipline-specific approach to assessing moral judgment. Science and Engineering
Ethics, 16(2), 387–407.
Borrego, M., Foster, M. J., & Froyd, J. E. (2014). Systematic literature reviews in engineering education
and other developing interdisciplinary fields. Journal of Engineering Education, 103(1), 45–76.
Boss, J. A. (1994). The effect of community service work on the moral development of college ethics
students. Journal of Moral Education, 23(2), 183–198.
Brummel, B. J., Gunsalus, C. K., Anderson, K. L., & Loui, M. C. (2010). Development of role-play
scenarios for teaching responsible conduct of research. Science and Engineering Ethics, 16(3),
573–589.
Bucciarelli, L. L. (2008). Ethics and engineering education. European Journal of Engineering Education,
33(2), 141–149.
Canary, H. E., & Herkert, J. R. (2013). Assessing ethics education in programs and centers: Challenges
and strategies. In F. F. Benya, C. H. Fletcher, & R. D. Hollander (Eds.), Practical guidance on
science and engineering ethics education for instructors and administrators: Papers and summary
from a workshop December 12, 2012. Washington, DC: National Academies Press.
Cao, G. H. (2015). Comparison of China-US engineering ethics educations in Sino-Western philosophies
of technology. Science and Engineering Ethics, 21(6), 1609–1635.
Catalano, G. D. (2004). Senior capstone design and ethics: A bridge to the professional world. Science
and Engineering Ethics, 10(2), 409–415.
Chung, C. A. (2015). Comparison of cross culture engineering ethics training using the simulator for
engineering ethics education. Science and Engineering Ethics, 21(2), 471–478.
Chung, C. A., & Alfred, M. (2009). Design, development, and evaluation of an interactive simulator for
engineering ethics education (SEEE). Science and Engineering Ethics, 15(2), 189–199.
Colby, A., & Sullivan, W. M. (2008). Ethics teaching in undergraduate engineering education. Journal of
Engineering Education, 97(3), 327–338.
Conlon, E., & Zandvoort, H. (2011). Broadening ethics teaching in engineering: Beyond the
individualistic approach. Science and Engineering Ethics, 17(2), 217–232.
Cruz, J. A., & Frey, W. J. (2003). An effective strategy for integrating ethics across the curriculum in
engineering: An ABET 2000 challenge. Science and Engineering Ethics, 9(4), 543–568.
Cruz, J. A., Frey, W. J., & Sanchez, H. D. (2004). The Ethics Bowl in engineering ethics at the University
of Puerto Rico-Mayagüez. Teaching Ethics, 4(2), 15–31.
A Systematic Literature Review of US Engineering Ethics… 579
123
Davis, M. (1991). Thinking like an engineer: The place of a code of ethics in the practice of a profession.
Philosophy & Public Affairs, 20(2) 150–167.
Davis, M. (2006a). Engineering ethics, individuals, and organizations. Science and Engineering Ethics,
12(2), 223–231.
Davis, M. (2006b). Integrating ethics into technical courses: Micro-insertion. Science and Engineering
Ethics, 12(4), 717–730.
Davis, M., & Feinerman, A. (2012). Assessing graduate student progress in engineering ethics. Science
and Engineering Ethics, 18(2), 351–367.
Davis, M., & Riley, K. (2008). Ethics across the graduate engineering curriculum: An experiment in
teaching and assessment. Teaching Ethics, 9(1), 25–42.
Devon, R., & van de Poel, I. (2004). Design ethics: The social ethics paradigm. International Journal of
Engineering Education, 20(3), 461–469.
Doorn, N. (2012). Responsibility ascriptions in technology development and engineering: Three
perspectives. Science and Engineering Ethics, 18(1), 69–90.
Downey, G. L., Lucena, J. C., & Mitcham, C. (2007). Engineering ethics and identity: Emerging
initiatives in comparative perspective. Science and Engineering Ethics, 13(4), 463–487.
Drake, M. J., Griffin, P. M., Kirkman, R., & Swann, J. L. (2005). Engineering ethical curricula:
Assessment and comparison of two approaches. Journal of Engineering Education, 94(2), 223–231.
Ermer, G. E. (2004). Using case studies to teach engineering ethics and professionalism. Teaching Ethics,
4(2), 33–40.
Eyler, J., Giles Jr., D. E., Stenson, C. M., & Gray, C. J. (2001). At a glance: What we know about the
effects of service-learning on college students, faculty, institutions and communities, 1993–2000:
Third Edition. Higher Education.
Feldhaus, C. R., & Fox, P. L. (2004). Effectiveness of an ethics course delivered in traditional and non-
traditional formats. Science and Engineering Ethics, 10(2), 389–400.
Fleddermann, C. B. (2011). Engineering ethics (4th ed.). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Prentice Hall.
Fleischmann, S. T. (2004). Essential ethics—Embedding ethics into an engineering curriculum. Science
and Engineering Ethics, 10(2), 369–381.
Furco, A., & Root, S. (2010). Research demonstrates the value of service learning. Phi Delta Kappan,
91(5), 16–20.
Garcia, O. N., Varanasi, M. R., Acevedo, M. F., & Guturu, P. (2011). An innovative project and design
oriented electrical engineering curriculum at the University of North Texas. Advances in
Engineering Education, 2(4), 1–34.
Gilligan, C. (1982). In a different voice: Pyschological theory and women’s development. Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press.
Gorman, M., Duffy, J., & Heffernan, M. (1994). Service experience and the moral development of college
students. Religious Education, 89(3), 422–431.
Gorman, M., Hertz, M., Garrick, L., Magpili, L., Mauss, M., Mehalik, M., & Tuttle, J. B. (2000).
Integrating ethics & engineering: A graduate option in systems engineering, ethics, and technology
studies. Journal of Engineering Education, 89(4), 461–469.
Graber, G. C., & Pionke, C. D. (2006). A team-taught interdisciplinary approach to engineering ethics.
Science and Engineering Ethics, 12(2), 313–320.
Gupta, A. (2015). Foundations for value education in engineering: The Indian experience. Science and
Engineering Ethics, 21(2), 479–504.
Haase, S. (2013). An engineering dilemma: Sustainability in the eyes of future technology professionals.
Science and Engineering Ethics, 19(3), 893–911.
Hall, K. D. (2004). Student development and ownership of ethical and professional standards. Science and
Engineering Ethics, 10(2), 383–387.
Harris, C. E. (2008). The good engineer: Giving virtue its due in engineering ethics. Science and
Engineering Ethics, 14(2), 153–164.
Harris, C. E., Davis, M., Pritchard, M. S., & Rabins, M. J. (1996). Engineering ethics: What? why? how?
and when? Journal of Engineering Education, 85, 93–96.
Hashemian, G., & Loui, M. C. (2010). Can instruction in engineering ethics change students’ feelings
about professional responsibility? Science and Engineering Ethics, 16(1), 201–215.
Haws, D. R. (2001). Ethics instruction in engineering education: A (mini) meta-analysis. Journal of
Engineering Education, 90(2), 223–229.
Haws, D. R. (2004). The importance of meta-ethics in engineering education. Science and Engineering
Ethics, 10(2), 204–210.
580 J. L. Hess, G. Fore
123
Haws, D. R. (2006). Engineering the just war: Examination of an approach to teaching engineering ethics.
Science and Engineering Ethics, 12(2), 365–372.
Herkert, J. R. (2000). Engineering ethics education in the USA: Content, pedagogy and curriculum.
European Journal of Engineering Education, 25(4), 303–313.
Herkert, J. R. (2005). Ways of thinking about and teaching ethical problem solving: Microethics and
macroethics in engineering. Science and Engineering Ethics, 11(3), 373–385.
Herkert, J. R., Benya, F., Ellison, K., Hollander, R. D., Laas, K., & Raghavan, S. L. (2015). The Online
Resource Center for ethics education in engineering and science. Paper presented at the 122nd
ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition, Seattle, WA.
Hess, J. L., Strobel, J., & Pan, R. (2016). Voices from the workplace: Practitioners’ perspectives on the
role of empathy and care within engineering. Engineering Studies, 8(3), 212–242.
Hirsch, P. L., Linsenmeier, J. A. W., Smith, H. D., & Walker, J. M. T. (2005). Enhancing core
competency learning in an integrated summer research experience for bioengineers. Journal of
Engineering Education, 94(4), 391–401.
Hoffmann, M., & Borenstein, J. (2014). Understanding ill-structured engineering ethics problems through
a collaborative learning and argument visualization approach. Science and Engineering Ethics,
20(1), 261–276.
Holsapple, M. A., Sutkus, J., Carpenter, D. D., Finelli, C. J., Burt, B. A., Ra, E., Harding, T. S., & Bielby,
R. M. (2011). We can’t get no satisfaction!: The relationship between students’ ethical reasoning
and their satisfaction with engineering ethics education. Paper presented at the American Society for
Engineering Education Annual Conference, Vancouver, B.C.
Huff, C., & Frey, W. (2005). Moral pedagogy and practical ethics. Science and Engineering Ethics, 11(3),
389–408.
Jesson, J., Matheson, L., & Lacey, F. M. (2011). Doing your literature review: Traditional and systematic
techniques. London: SAGE Publications.
Jonassen, D. H., & Cho, Y. H. (2011). Fostering argumentation while solving engineering ethics
problems. Journal of Engineering Education, 100(4), 680–702.
Jonassen, D. H., Shen, D., Marra, R. M., Cho, Y. H., Lo, J. L., & Lohani, V. K. (2009). Engaging and
supporting problem solving in engineering ethics. Journal of Engineering Education, 98(3),
235–254.
Keefer, M. W., Wilson, S. E., Dankowicz, H., & Loui, M. C. (2014). The importance of formative
assessment in science and engineering ethics education: Some evidence and practical advice.
Science and Engineering Ethics, 20(1), 249–260.
Kisselburgh, L., Hess, J. L., Zoltowski, C. B., Beever, J., & Brightman, A. O. (2016). Assessing a
scaffolded, interactive, and reflective analysis framework for developing ethical reasoning in
engineering students. Paper presented at the American Society for Engineering Education, New
Orleans, LA.
Kligyte, V., Marcy, R. T., Waples, E. P., Sevier, S. T., Godfrey, E. S., Mumford, M. D., & Hougen, D. F.
(2008). Application of a sensemaking approach to ethics training in the physical sciences and
engineering. Science and Engineering Ethics, 14(2), 251–278.
Krippendorff, K. (2012). Content analysis. In E. Barnouw, G. Gerbner, W. Schramm, T. L. Worth, & L.
Gross (Eds.), International encyclopedia of communications (Vol. 1, pp. 403–407). Thousand Oaks:
Sage.
Lambek, Michael. (2010). Ordinary ethics: Anthropology, language, and action. New York, NY:
Fordham University Press.
Lambek, M., Das, V., Fassin, D., & Keane, W. (2015). Four lectures on ethics: Anthropological
perspectives. Chicago, IL: HAU.
Lau, A. S. (2004). Teaching engineering ethics to first-year college students. Science and Engineering
Ethics, 10(2), 359–368.
Lloyd, P., & Busby, J. (2003). ‘‘Things that went well—No serious injuries or deaths’’: Ethical reasoning
in a normal engineering design process. Science and Engineering Ethics, 9(4), 503–516.
Lohani, V. K., Wolfe, M. L., Wildman, T., Mallikarjunan, K., & Connor, J. (2011). Reformulating
general engineering and biological systems engineering programs at Virginia Tech. Advances in
Engineering Education, 2(4), 1–30.
Loui, M. C. (2005). Ethics and the development of professional identities of engineering students. Journal
of Engineering Education, 94(4), 383–390.
Loui, M. C. (2006). Assessment of an engineering ethics video: Incident at Morales. Journal of
Engineering Education, 95(1), 85–91.
A Systematic Literature Review of US Engineering Ethics… 581
123
Martin, T., Rayne, K., Kemp, N. J., Hart, J., & Diller, K. R. (2005). Teaching for adaptive expertise in
biomedical engineering ethics. Science and Engineering Ethics, 11(2), 257–276.
Mikic, B., & Grasso, D. (2002). Socially-relevant design: The TOYtech project at Smith College. Journal
of Engineering Education, 91(3), 319–326.
Monk, J. (2009). Ethics, engineers and drama. Science and Engineering Ethics, 15(1), 111–123.
Moore, C., Hart, H., Randall, D., & Nichols, S. P. (2006). PRiME: Integrating professional responsibility
into the engineering curriculum. Science and Engineering Ethics, 12(2), 273–289.
National Academy of Engineering. (2004). The Engineer of 2020: Visions of engineering in the new
century. Washington DC: National Academies Press.
National Academy of Engineering. (2009). Engineering in K-12 education: Understanding the status and
improving the prosects. Washington, DC: National Academies Press.
National Academy of Engineering. (2016). Infusing ethics into the development of engineers: Exemplary
education activities and programs. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press.
National Society of Professional Engineers. (2017). NSPE Code of Ethics for Engineers. Retrieved March
7, 2017 from http://www.nspe.org/Ethics/CodeofEthics/index.html.
Newberry, B. (2004). The dilemma of ethics in engineering education. Science and Engineering Ethics,
10(2), 343–351.
Newberry, B. (2010). Katrina: Macro-ethical issues for engineers. Science and Engineering Ethics, 16(3),
535–571.
Newberry, B., Austin, K., Lawson, W., Gorsuch, G., & Darwin, T. (2011). Acclimating international
graduate students to professional engineering ethics. Science and Engineering Ethics, 17(1),
171–194.
Pantazidou, M., & Nair, I. (1999). Ethic of care: Guiding principles for engineering teaching and practice.
Journal of Engineering Education, 88(2), 205–212.
Pappas, E. C., Kampe, S. L., Hendricks, R. W., & Kander, R. G. (2004). An assessment analysis
methodology and its application to an advanced engineering communications program. Journal of
Engineering Education, 93(3), 233–242.
Passino, K. M. (2009). Educating the humanitarian engineering. Science and Engineering Ethics, 15(4),
577–600.
Pimmel, R. (2001). Cooperative learning instructional activities in a capstone design course. Journal of
Engineering Education, 90(3), 413–421.
Prince, R. (2006). Teaching engineering ethics using role-playing in a culturally diverse student group.
Science and Engineering Ethics, 12(2), 321–326.
Rayne, K., Martin, T., Brophy, S., Kemp, N. J., Hart, J. D., & Diller, K. R. (2006). The development of
adaptive expertise in biomedical engineering ethics. Journal of Engineering Education, 95(2),
165–173.
Rest, J. R., Bebeau, M. J., & Thoma, S. J. (2014). Postconventional moral thinking: A neo-Kohlbergian
approach. Mahwah, NJ: Psychology Press.
Rest, J. R., Narvaez, D., Thoma, S. J., & Bebeau, M. J. (1999). DIT2: Devising and testing a revised
instrument of moral judgment. Journal of Educational Psychology, 91(4), 644–659.
Rest, J. R., Narvaez, D., Thoma, S. J., & Bebeau, M. J. (2000). A neo-Kohlbergian approach to morality
research. Journal of Moral Education, 29(4), 381–395.
Riley, D. (2013). Hidden in plain view: Feminists doing engineering ethics, engineers doing feminist
ethics. Science and Engineering Ethics, 19(1), 189–206.
Safferman, S. I., Zoghi, M., & Farhey, D. N. (2001). First year civil and environmental engineering
design experience. Journal of Engineering Education, 90(4), 645–651.
Santi, P. M. (2000). Ethics exercises for civil, environmental and geological engineers. Journal of
Engineering Education, 89(2), 151–159.
Segall, A. E. (2002). Science fiction in the engineering classroom to help teach basic concepts and
promote the profession. Journal of Engineering Education, 91(4), 419–423.
Sevier, C., Chyung, S. Y., Callahan, J., & Schrader, C. (2012). What value does service learning have on
introductory engineering students’ motivation and ABET program outcomes? Journal of STEM
Education, 13(4), 55–70.
Spier, R., & Bird, S. J. (2007). Science and Engineering Ethics at Springer. Science and Engineering
Ethics, 13(1), 1–3.
Spier, R., & Bird, S. J. (2014). Science and Engineering Ethics enters its third decade. Science and
Engineering Ethics, 20(1), 1–3.
582 J. L. Hess, G. Fore
123
Steele, L., Johnson, J., Watts, L., MacDougall, A., Mumford, M., Connelly, S., & Williams, T. H. L.
(2016). A comparison of the effects of ethics training on international and US students. Science and
Engineering Ethics, 22(4), 1217–1244.
Steinberg, K. S., Hatcher, J. A., & Bringle, R. G. (2011). Civic-minded graduate: A north star. Michigan
Journal of Community Service Learning, 18(1), 19–33.
Streveler, R. A., Smith, K. A., & Pilotte, M. (2012). Aligning course content, assessment, and delivery:
Creating a context for outcome-based education. In K. M. Yusof, S. Mohammad, N. A. Azli, M.
N. Hassan, A. Kosnin & S. Yusof (Eds.), Outcome-based education and engineering curriculum:
Evaluation, assessment and accreditation. Hershey, PA: IGI Global.
Strobel, J., Hess, J. L., Pan, R. C., & Wachter Morris, C. A. (2013). Empathy and care within engineering:
Qualitative perspectives from engineering faculty and practicing engineers. Engineering Studies,
5(3), 137–159.
Sunderland, M. E. (2014). Taking emotion seriously: Meeting students where they are. Science and
Engineering Ethics, 20(1), 183–195.
Verharen, C., Tharakan, J., Middendorf, G., Castro-Sitiriche, M., & Kadoda, G. (2013). Introducing
survival ethics into engineering education and practice. Science and Engineering Ethics, 19(2),
599–623.
Walther, J., Miller, S., & Sochacka, N. W. (2017). A model of empathy in engineering as a core skill,
practice orientation, and professional way of being. Journal of Engineering Education, 106(1),
123–148.
Wilson, W. R. (2013). Using the Chernobyl incident to teach engineering ethics. Science and Engineering
Ethics, 19(2), 625–640.
Wittig, A. (2013). Implementing problem based learning through Engineers Without Borders student
projects. Advances in Engineering Education, 3(4), 1–20.
Yadav, A., & Barry, B. E. (2009). Using case-based instruction to increase ethical understanding in
engineering: What do we know? What do we need? International Journal of Engineering Education,
25(1), 138–143.
Zoltowski, C. B., Oakes, W. C., & Cardella, M. E. (2012). Students’ ways of experiencing human-
centered design. Journal of Engineering Education, 101(1), 28–59.
A Systematic Literature Review of US Engineering Ethics… 583
123
- A Systematic Literature Review of US Engineering Ethics Interventions
- Abstract
- Introduction
- Background
- Theoretical Framework
- Methodology
- Defining: The Research Questions and Sub-Questions
- Scoping: Identifying Where and How to Look for the Literature
- Cataloguing: Gathering Literature and Creating a Database
- Exploring: Engaging with the Literature
- Checking: Interrater Reliability
- Quantizing: Descriptive Statistics
- Overview of Studies: Contexts, Curricular Integration Strategies, and Delivery Formats
- Rationale and Justification
- Learning Goals
- Pedagogy and Activities
- Philosophical Ethics
- Case Study Typology
- Quantitative Assessments
- Qualitative Assessments
- Literature Exemplars
- Exemplar 1: Problem Based-Learning and Ethics Instruction (Wittig 2013)
- Exemplar 2: Qualitatively Investigating Course Efficacy (Hashemian and Loui 2010)
- Exemplar 3: A Cross-Disciplinary Ethical Decision-Making Heuristic (Kligyte et al. 2008)
- Discussion: Interpreting and Narrating
- Purpose of Engineering Ethics Instruction
- Pedagogical Trends and Suggestions
- Evaluation Considerations
- Conclusion
- Limitations
- Appendix
- References
