Proposing an Engineering Gendered Racial Microaggression Scale

Background Minorities in engineering regularly experience negative statements or behaviors of others that disparage them due to their gender, race, ethnicity, or other identity. Students from engineering have cited these persistent subtle negative statements and behaviors, or microaggressions, as reasons for considering leaving engineering programs or the university entirely. Previous measures of microaggressions have not been designed to capture the unique experiences of minorities within the engineering environment. Purpose This research differs from previous work because it incorporates an intersectional perspective by acknowledging microaggressions are not experienced universally for individuals within all groups or institutions (Crenshaw et al. 1993; Wilkins 2012). In the context of a predominantly white institution (PWI) and a historically black college/university (HBCU), the experiences of gender and racial minorities in engineering departments were asked to share their experiences to identify overarching themes in microaggressive language and actions. The research strives to answer, “How do gender and race microaggressions affect student success and persistence in engineering programs?” Brief Research Methodology and Approach The preliminary scale used a three phased approach to scaled design to nest the novel scale in the existing literature, previous scales, and from interviews with minority engineering undergraduate students. The current paper presents a preliminary Engineering Gender and Racial Microaggression Scale (EGRMS) to measure microaggressions within the engineering environment. Preliminary Results This research expands knowledge on intersectional microaggression experiences of engineering students. The overarching goal is to address the needs of multiple identity groups including the dominant white male student, female students, and students of color

Ethical Development in Undergraduate Engineering: Results from a Multi-University Survey

During undergraduate engineering education, curriculum often focuses on technical knowledge rather than ethical development. The role of ethics within the engineering profession, whether broadly or as it applies to specific circumstances, is often given a cursory lesson rather than being woven throughout the curriculum for optimal understanding. When ethics is incorporated into curriculum, programs tend to focus on microethics concerning issues that arise in particular contexts and interactions between individuals, rather than macroethics that address societal concerns more broadly. Notably, students often obtain an informal ethics education—i.e., education outside of the classroom— through involvement in student organizations, internships, or daily interactions with peers. For instance, a student interning at a water resources engineering firm might visit the project site of a stormwater revitalization. Upon visiting, the student can recognize the disparities between communities that typically receive these services fist and those communities of color and lower socioeconomic status that are often ignored. Witnessing this unjust system firsthand can encourage that student to consider systemic inequities in future work. Experiences such as this contribute to a student’s ethical development and can impact their work as an engineering professional. In this study, we aim to understand the differences in ethical development among students based on sociodemographic factors. In April 2020, we deployed a survey to undergraduate students at two universities to assess ethical development using the Defining Issues Test (DIT). The results of this test include a numeric rating indicating the student’s level of ethical development based on Kohlberg’s Stages of Moral Development. By using the DIT, we were able to produce a standardized metric to evaluate ethical development across universities, majors, and sociodemographic factors. We used statistical inferencing to explore how sociodemographics were associated with ethics. Here we present the survey analyses, showing that certain demographics may impact a student’s ethical development. For instance, the preliminary results of this study show that women scored higher on the DIT than men. Additionally, those students who identified as liberal had a higher score than those who identified as conservative, and those who identified as less religious scored higher than those who identified as very religious. These results suggest that ethical decisions are grounded in political and religious beliefs. Further research can identify why and how political and religious views influence ethical decision-making.This conference proceeding is published as LaPatin, Michaela Leigh, Cristina Poleacovschi, Kate Padgett Walsh, Scott Grant Feinstein, Luan Minh Nguyen, and Kasey M. Faust. "Ethical Development in Undergraduate Engineering: Results from a Multi-University Survey." In 2021 ASEE Virtual Annual Conference Content Access. 2021. https://peer.asee.org/37099. ASEE holds the copyright on this document. It may be read by the public free of charge. Authors may archive their work on personal websites or in institutional repositories with the following citation: © 2021 American Society for Engineering Education. Other scholars may excerpt or quote from these materials with the same citation. When excerpting or quoting from Conference Proceedings, authors should, in addition to noting the ASEE copyright, list all the original authors and their institutions and name the host city of the conference. Posted with permission

Investigating On-campus Engineering Student Organizations as Means of Promoting Ethical Development

Ethics is and should be intrinsic to engineering. However, many engineering students do not recognize that every engineering decision contains ethical dimensions and that underlying values and current sociopolitical and cultural contexts can influence those decisions. One potential way to enhance engineering students’ ethical development is through extra-curricular activities (ECAs). ECAs can include many topics and interests, such as student societies (e.g., fraternities and sororities) and cultural and social organizations (e.g., Society of Hispanic Professional Engineers, Latinos in Science and Engineering, Society of Women Engineers). Previous studies emphasize that participation in student organizations plays an important role in the ethical development of students. Despite this important role, it is not clear whether some student organizations are more successful at enhancing ethical development of engineering students than others, or if it is the act of participation in these organizations itself has an effect on students’ ethical development. We hypothesize that the more organizations students participate in, the higher their ethical development will be. As such, we ask, does participation in more organizations enhances students’ overall moral development? To respond to this question, we distributed a survey to senior engineering students (n=165) at one Midwestern university in the spring of 2020. The survey captured demographics information, membership in student organizations, and the standardized Defining Issue Test-2 (DIT-2), which measures students’ ethical developmental indices (Personal Interest, Maintaining Norms, Post-conventional Thinking Score, and N2Score). The preliminary results suggest that there are significant differences between the groups of students who participated in one organization and two organizations as well as between one organization and three or more organizations, with the largest difference between those who participated in one organization and those who participated in three or more organizations. This suggests that it is possible that students with low PI scores become involved in more student organizations. This project studies student organizations as key sites for ethical learning. The research suggests that students should be encouraged to participate in more student organizations in order to promote their overall ethical development.This conference proceeding is published as Nguyen, Luan M., Cristina Poleacovschi, Kasey M. Faust, Kate Padgett Walsh, Michaela Leigh LaPatin, Scott Grant Feinstein, and Cassandra Rutherford. "Investigating On-campus Engineering Student Organizations as Means of Promoting Ethical Development." In 2021 ASEE Virtual Annual Conference Content Access. 2021. https://peer.asee.org/37396 ASEE holds the copyright on this document. It may be read by the public free of charge. Authors may archive their work on personal websites or in institutional repositories with the following citation: © 2021 American Society for Engineering Education. Other scholars may excerpt or quote from these materials with the same citation. When excerpting or quoting from Conference Proceedings, authors should, in addition to noting the ASEE copyright, list all the original authors and their institutions and name the host city of the conference. Posted with permission.

COVID-19 Pandemic Reveals a Major Challenge in Engineering Ethics Education

Engineering ethics education often focuses on the actions of individual engineers as well as their relationship with clients, colleagues, and employers (microethics) while paying less attention to the broader impacts of engineering work on society (macroethics). We can further divide both micro and macroethics into two levels each. Individual microethics refers to the actions of individual engineers while professional microethics refers to the relationships between individual professionals and their clients, colleagues, and employers. Professional macroethics refers to the problems facing members of the engineering profession as a group in their relation to society while social macroethics refers to the technological policy decisions at the societal level. Ideally, an ethical engineer would be able to engage with all four types of ethics, and as such, we ask here, “which pillar of ethics do engineering students engage with when faced with ethical issues surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic?” The COVID-19 pandemic represents an extreme example of an ethical issue that directly affects students’ day-to-day lives. We recognize that students may engage with different pillars of ethics under different scenarios. In this analysis, we aim to provide insights into how we could improve engineering ethics education by identifying with which area(s) of ethics do students engage. Here, we claim that both micro and macroethical thinking are required to address the pandemic and its associated social problems. We distributed a survey to senior engineering students at a Midwestern university (n=171). Preliminary analyses suggested that students engaged with professional macroethics the most while social ethics was rarely mentioned. This is expected as previous studies have shown that many engineering students lack social competencies. The results contribute to further understanding of the area(s) of engineering ethics where students are most proficient. In addition, we propose the possibility of developing a COVID-19 pandemic ethical scenario that could be integrated into curriculum as it taps into various macroethical pillars. The study will contribute to improving the use of the micro-macroethics framework in understanding how students engage with ethics in different scenarios.This conference proceeding is published as Nguyen, Luan M., Cristina Poleacovschi, Kasey M. Faust, Michaela Leigh LaPatin, Kate Padgett Walsh, Scott Grant Feinstein, and Cassandra Rutherford. "COVID-19 Pandemic Reveals a Major Challenge in Engineering Ethics Education." Paper ID #34500. In 2021 ASEE Virtual Annual Conference Content Access. 2021. DOI: 10.18260/1-2--36860. ASEE holds the copyright on this document. It may be read by the public free of charge. Authors may archive their work on personal websites or in institutional repositories with the following citation: © 2021 American Society for Engineering Education. Other scholars may excerpt or quote from these materials with the same citation. When excerpting or quoting from Conference Proceedings, authors should, in addition to noting the ASEE copyright, list all the original authors and their institutions and name the host city of the conference. Posted with permission

What Role do Civil Engineering Students See for their Profession in the COVID-19 Response?

Engineering education typically focuses on technical knowledge rather than ethical development. When ethics are incorporated into curriculum, the focus is usually on microethics concerning issues that arise in particular contexts and interactions between individuals, rather than macroethics that address broad societal concerns. The COVID-19 pandemic has presented a unique opportunity to assess macroethical understanding because unjust social, economic, and environmental systems have been brought to the forefront of the response. In this study, we aim to understand students’ awareness of unjust systems and the ethical responsibilities of engineers. At the beginning of the pandemic in the United States, in April 2020, we deployed a survey to undergraduate engineering students at two universities. We asked students to explain what they perceived to be the role of the engineering profession in response to the global COVID-19 pandemic. This paper focuses on the responses of undergraduate civil engineering students, totaling a sample size of 84 students across two universities. We used qualitative analyses (deductive and inductive coding) to categorize responses between “macroethics is present” and “macroethics is not present”, and we used quantitative analysis to test the two categories with sociodemographic factors for association. We show that there are statistically significant differences across student responses given certain sociodemographic factors. Responses from women focused more on macroethics as compared to responses from men. There was also a difference in responses between the universities surveyed, showing that institutional differences may impact students’ macroethical development. Potential implications from this study include recommendations on curricular content and identifying which student demographic groups would benefit most from intentional macroethical content in coursework. Additionally, increasing diversity and representation of women in engineering may impact the engineering industry’s focus on macroethics.This conference proceeding is published as LaPatin, Michaela Leigh, Cristina Poleacovschi, Kate Padgett Walsh, Scott Grant Feinstein, Cassandra Rutherford, Luan Minh Nguyen, Kasey M. Faust, and Liam Verses. "What Role do Civil Engineering Students See for their Profession in the COVID-19 Response?." In 2021 ASEE Virtual Annual Conference Content Access. 2021. https://peer.asee.org/38048. ASEE holds the copyright on this document. It may be read by the public free of charge. Authors may archive their work on personal websites or in institutional repositories with the following citation: © 2021 American Society for Engineering Education. Other scholars may excerpt or quote from these materials with the same citation. When excerpting or quoting from Conference Proceedings, authors should, in addition to noting the ASEE copyright, list all the original authors and their institutions and name the host city of the conference. Posted with permission