Rowan nets NSF award to develop accurate assessment tools for engineering ethics courses

On January 28, 1986, the space shuttle Challenger exploded 73 seconds after takeoff, killing all seven crew members. Engineers at a contractor company working for NASA had warned about the O-ring’s potential for failure in sub-zero temperatures but managers overrode their objections. Could both sides have done more?

Kevin Dahm, Ph.D., a professor in the Department of Chemical Engineering in the Henry M. Rowan College of Engineering, wants engineering students to conduct such nuanced ethics discussions in the classroom where the stakes are low.

“You might not be able to teach someone to be ethical but you can make an ethical person better at decision-making, at evaluating perspectives from a global and societal context,” Dahm said.

A phase II $750,000 grant from the National Science Foundation will help Dahm and a cohort of researchers across three additional campuses—University of Connecticut, University of Pittsburgh, and the New Jersey Institute of Technology—build an educational and assessment tool for engineering ethics education. Rowan receives $125,000 of the grant.

Phase I of the research involved designing the course by gamifying engineering ethics for related courses taught at Rowan, University of Connecticut and University of Pittsburgh.

One of the activities included playing a “Choose Your Own Adventure” on Mars. Over the course of a semester, students work through fourteen distinct dilemmas. Two other activities were modeled on popular games, Cards Against Humanity and Family Feud. 

While Phase I received glowing reviews, Dahm and researchers found assessments borrowed from the literature failed to accurately measure the courses’ impact and success. “The instrument isn’t sensitive enough to detect what we were actually accomplishing,” Dahm said.

Phase II hopes to solve the problem by developing a more appropriate assessment tool. It will build on traditional ways of evaluating qualitative research, which involves applying categorization codes for different lines of thought. Utilitarian thinking might receive one code, while a legalistic or different line of thought receives a corresponding code. 

When playing the game, students outline their decisions and write text to explain their thought processes. In the updated version, natural language programming models will help identify phrases or sentences in these written responses that can be compared against a list of thought-categorization codes and track student responses over the course of the semester.

“The root goal is to see whether the students’ decision-making processes become more holistic and refined as the semester progresses,” Dahm said. 

Research has begun into the assessment tool with the three schools serving as a test bed to develop a comprehensive approach to the field of engineering ethics. The net result, Dahm hopes, will be an educational kit “that is disseminated and easily adapted and that all engineering schools can access.” 

“Everyone agrees we should avoid bad outcomes in engineering decisions and we want students to be thinking about what they would do in difficult situations,” Dahm said. Education focused on ethics in engineering will equip students with the skills and thought processes needed to execute highly nuanced ethical decisions when much more is at stake.