Assessing Ethics Education Effectiveness in Engineering Programmes: A Multi-Phase Approach

Engineers are involved in projects which face ethical issues on a day to day bases and can have ethical impacts on individuals, society and the environment. Although there is an expanding body of work on ethics and professional ethics education, researchers have noticed gaps, inconsistencies and limitations in the literature, particularly in the area of engineering ethics education. Engineering curricula focus mainly on technical skills and give less attention to improving ethical skills related to engineering. To provide more clarity and understanding of ethical decisions and how to improve these decisions among engineering students, this research aims to investigate whether ethics education can help develop engineering students’ ethical perceptions and decision-making skills. This thesis addresses one main gap in ethics education in the engineering discipline, which is exploring the effectiveness of ethics education in engineering programmes. A new conceptual model is developed to provide more understanding and to address the factors that can affect students’ ethical perceptions and reasoning. The model employs two frameworks which are a moral reasoning and the Royal Academy of Engineering’s Statement of Ethical Principles. The first framework focuses on exploring students moral reasoning based on Rest’s four components model. The second framework focuses on exploring students’ ratings of the level of importance and the level of development based on the Royal Academy of Engineering’s Statement of Ethical Principles. The result of the research shows that there is a positive impact of ethics education in the engineering curricula, where students that were exposed to ethics education interventions showed superior ethical skills compared to those who were not. This research served as a tool for academics and professional engineers to help in assessing ethics education, and to provide an understanding of the different roles individual and organisational factors can play in ethical decision making.