Understanding the Differences between Faculty and Administrator Goals and Students’ Experiences with Ethics Education

Abstract

There is strong agreement about the need for effective ethics education in engineering academic programs, but students who graduate with a bachelor’s degree in engineering continue to be unprepared to face the ethical dilemmas of professional engineering. This study uses qualitative data collected at 18 diverse institutions and employs the Transmission Model of Communication to examine ethics education. We investigate the ways that communication channels and noise contribute to discrepancies in the goals and perceptions of faculty and staff and the experiences of students in regards to curricular ethics education. We present data that shows that faculty and administrators consider a balance between the knowledge of ethics, ethical reasoning, and ethical behavior to be important, while students report experiencing ethics education that focuses almost solely on knowledge. The paper uses this discrepancy as an illustration to demonstrate the way the model can be used to identify factors that contribute to these differing perceptions. Our work provides support for the use of the model for understanding ethics education. Implications for educators are presented.