Exploring the Constitutive and Social Processes of Ethics in Multidisciplinary Engineering Design Teams

This study seeks to examine the communicative constitution of ethics in team-based design projects in an engineering education context. Engineering and design work involve complex social processes and ethical decision-making activities and collaboration (Bucciarelli, 2010). The understanding and development of ethics in future engineers is a primary concern for engineering educators, students, and the governing bodies that oversee this field (ABET, 2013; NAE, 2012). Specifically, given the highly fluid and subjective nature of ethics and the complications of the team-based context, challenges arise about how to move beyond codes and standards that are intended to guide ethical conduct (ASEE, 2012; NSPE, 2011) and encourage ethical orientations in future engineers that may help them guide themselves

Twenty questions about design behavior for sustainability, report of the International Expert Panel on behavioral science for design

How behavioral scientists, engineers, and architects can work together to advance how we all understand and practice design—in order to enhance sustainability in the built environment, and beyond.https://www.nature.com/documents/design_behavior_for_sustainability.pdfPublished versio

Ethical Decision-Making in Construction Engineering Projects

Problems exist with ethical decision-making in U.S. construction engineering projects. The purpose of this study was to explore factors that affect ethical decision-making in engineering construction in the United States. The general concepts of marketing ethics, Kohlberg\u27s discussion of ethical and moral reasoning development, and Gillian\u27s discussion of ethical care served as the basis of the conceptual framework. Factors that inhibit ethical decision making were addressed in the research questions. The resulting narrative framework included implementable initiatives based on these factors that could improve the quality of ethical decision-making and the impact of these initiatives on the cost and quality of construction engineering projects. The use of qualitative grounded theory design led to findings from the research questions and enabled the development of a theory to explain the phenomenon. The research was based on data collected from interviews with a purposive sample of 12 civil engineers with 15 to 45 years of forensic and managerial experience with construction engineering projects. The constant comparative method was used to analyze the data. The principal finding from the research was that unethical decision-making in the legal and political systems undermines the image and authority of construction engineers in the United States. The findings of the study may cause social change by indicating how to enhance the ethical behavior of individuals involved in decision-making within the U.S. construction engineering industry, leading to improvements in the cost and quality of construction projects that benefit individual stakeholders as well as society

Priming and Mining the Civil Engineering Mindset: How Personal Values and Perfectionism Shape Societal Engagement and Consideration in Design

There are many ongoing calls for the integration of public welfare needs and concerns into engineering curricula and practice; for example, promoting social consciousness, human-centred design, and other socially-related frameworks. However, some engineering students still seem to devalue or resist these initiatives. This project attempts to overcome this problem by exploring a new methodology to facilitate such integrations, whilst bypassing the possible resistance. In the first intervention, this project explores to facilitate such notions via exploiting the psychology-informed approach of priming. Results of the first intervention showed that the priming initially intended to raise empathy (and by extension, social consciousness) scores unexpectedly resulted in significantly decreasing them. This initiated the second and third interventions, which explored how different key facets of the mindset (i.e., personal values and perfectionism, respectively) contribute to decision-making, particularly in contexts of human-centred designing and socially relevant initiatives, in civil engineering design. Such research on exploring the engineering mindset was to also inform the under-explored research literature on the subjective nature of sustainable decision-making in engineering. .. The second and third interventions therefore serve to fill the gap on addressing the subjective nature of sustainable decision-making in engineering, by researching to understand how the different facets of the mindset (i.e., personal values and perfectionism, respectively) dictate decision-making and facilitate (or hinder) social engagement and consideration in human-centric designing and socially considerate contexts. The influence of priming on such decision-making processes and social considerations were also observed in light of the different facets of the mindset. Results show that the majority of civil engineering undergraduates hold dominant Higher Order Values rooted in Self Transcendence (60.87%), and were categorised as perfectionists (74.48%). Findings indicate that those with Higher Order Value rooted in Self Transcendence were significantly less likely to produce what I term Communal Designs (i.e., designs that inform the metaphysical as well as the physical needs of the end-user), compared to those with dominant values rooted in the Higher Order Value of Openness to Change. Students were also found to transition in value towards the Higher Order Value of Conservation with time (i.e., with transition from year 1 to year 3 in a civil engineering programme), and thus transition away from their likelihood of producing Communal Designs by extension. Similarly, those categorised as perfectionists were significantly less likely to produce Communal Designs compared to those categorised as non-perfectionists. Perfectionists were later found to be associated with the Higher Order Value of Conservation when resumed back to the literature for sense-making of the present findings. Underlying common motives of Self-Protection and Anxiety-Avoidance were thus deduced to be hindering ‘truthful’ (i.e., intrinsically driven) engagement with human-centric initiatives, and production of what I termed Communal Designs. An intention-behaviour gap was found prominent in civil engineering undergraduates perhaps intending to, but then failing to produce Communal Designs. Further, the reversed influence of the priming was then discussed to be relative to the underlying motives of self-protection and anxiety-avoidance of the civil engineering undergraduates. Findings of the present project thus serve as a foundation for future mitigative studies or interventions promoting socially considerate initiatives or practices in civil engineering designs

Theories and Models Relevant to Cheating-Behaviour

Reviewers of previous-research, for the study of academic-dishonesty, cite lack of a theoretical-framework as a serious-flaw that limits the generalizations to be reasonably-made. The concept and term of theory are essential in any-discipline, that perceives itself as scholarly or scientific, hence theory is essential in educational-research as a research-domain. Interest in theory-method relations, comes from previous-works on structure and agency in teaching-learning-interactions in higher-education. In addition, there have been criticisms of the extent of theory use and the type of theory applied in higher-education-research. This study is therefore, focused on illustrative-review of theories and models relevant to cheating-behaviour, which resulted in an array of 19 theories, 10 models and 3 supportive-approaches. This contribution seeks inspiring an interest in the academic-fraternity into using solid-theoretical-foundation for their-study on cheating-behaviour, thus promoting of educational-research of high-scientific-value. It also anticipates enhancing the knowledge-base for professional-education and its policy-making and administration, among other-areas. Keywords: theory, model, cheating, behaviour, education, reseach

Challenges for engineering students working with authentic complex problems

Engineers are important participants in solving societal, environmental and technical problems. However, due to an increasing complexity in relation to these problems new interdisciplinary competences are needed in engineering. Instead of students working with monodisciplinary problems, a situation where students work with authentic complex problems in interdisciplinary teams together with a company may scaffold development of new competences. The question is: What are the challenges for students structuring the work on authentic interdisciplinary problems? This study explores a three-day event where 7 students from Aalborg University (AAU) from four different faculties and one student from University College North Denmark (UCN), (6th-10th semester), worked in two groups at a large Danish company, solving authentic complex problems. The event was structured as a Hackathon where the students for three days worked with problem identification, problem analysis and finalizing with a pitch competition presenting their findings. During the event the students had workshops to support the work and they had the opportunity to use employees from the company as facilitators. It was an extracurricular activity during the summer holiday season. The methodology used for data collection was qualitative both in terms of observations and participants’ reflection reports. The students were observed during the whole event. Findings from this part of a larger study indicated, that students experience inability to transfer and transform project competences from their previous disciplinary experiences to an interdisciplinary setting