The Challenges of Assessing In-the-Moment Ethical Decision-Making

The engineering education community lacks a consensus on an effective assessment tool to gauge the growth of undergraduate students' ethical reasoning throughout a course or program. The Engineering Ethics Reasoning Instrument (EERI) was developed by a team at Purdue and is based on the NSPE Code of Ethics [1,2]. Previous research has shown that the EERI failed to detect significant growth in ethical reasoning during a single-semester course, which contained substantial ethics content [3]. We hypothesized that perhaps the EERI could detect a significant change in students' ethical reasoning over the course of a four-year undergraduate program, during which students are typically exposed to many engineering-contextualized ethical dilemmas, both via coursework as well as potential work experiences. Using a quasi-experimental design, we used the EERI to measure changes in the ethical reasoning of 178 undergraduates at a Public R1 university in the Northeast across multiple engineering disciplines. Analysis of EERI data typically focuses on two outputs - a student's P score and N2 score. The P score measures the extent to which students employ Kohlbergian postconventional thinking, which is characterized by ethical reasoning based on universal good [1,4]. The N2 score takes into account how much postconventional thinking is used and preconventional (self-interested) thinking is absent [1,4]. We found that over the course of the four-year program, the EERI did not indicate any change in N2 score (n = 178, p = 0.65), but showed a decrease of -3.38 in P score (n = 178, p = 0.017). This suggests that over four years, there is a reduction in students prioritizing decisions that were altruistic and based on universal good. It is challenging to predict why this occurs, but we tentatively suggest that it may reflect a more accurate representation of students' thoughts on these ethical dilemmas. Additionally, it might indicate a deeper consideration of the complex factors typically involved in real ethical decisions, rather than merely an abstract evaluation of what a reasonable engineer should do. Given these results and to gain a fuller understanding of students' changes in ethical reasoning throughout their undergraduate programs, we contend that qualitative measures should also be employed. Ethical reasoning can be ill-defined and multidimensional, making quantification of a student's ethical reasoning challenging and difficult to interpret. A qualitative instrument designed to be 1st person, situated, contextually-rich, and playful might more accurately capture students' in-the-moment ethical decision-making.