Comparing First-Year Engineering Student Conceptions of Ethical Decision-Making to Performance on Standardized Assessments of Ethical Reasoning

Abstract

The Defining Issues Test 2 (DIT-2) and Engineering Ethical Reasoning Instrument (EERI) are designed to measure ethical reasoning of general (DIT-2) and engineering-student (EERI) populations. These tools-and the DIT-2 especially-have gained wide usage for assessing the ethical reasoning of undergraduate students. This paper reports on a research study in which the ethical reasoning of first-year undergraduate engineering students at multiple universities was assessed with both of these tools. In addition to these two instruments, students were also asked to create personal concept maps of the phrase "ethical decision-making." It was hypothesized that students whose instrument scores reflected more postconventional levels of moral development and more sophisticated ethical reasoning skills would likewise have richer, more detailed concept maps of ethical decision-making, reflecting their deeper levels of understanding of this topic and the complex of related concepts. In fact, there was no significant correlation between the instrument scores and concept map scoring, suggesting that the way first-year students conceptualize ethical decision making does not predict the way they behave when performing scenario-based ethical reasoning (perhaps more situated). This disparity indicates a need to more precisely quantify engineering ethical reasoning and decision making, if we wish to inform assessment outcomes using the results of such quantitative analyses.

Keywords: Concept maps; Engineering ethics; Ethical decision-making; Ethical reasoning; Ethics assessment.

Fig. 1

Breakdown of Concept Map (adapted from Watson et al., 2016)

Fig. 2

Expert Concept Map Developed via Modified Delphi Technique

Fig. 3

Example of bottom quartile map (left—Traditional Score = 9 pts) and top quartile map (right—Traditional Score = 110 pts). Figure reproduced from (Reed et al., 2021)