Ethics Instruction in Engineering Education: A (Mini) Meta‐Analysis

What are the objectives of engineering ethics? How is it being taught and how might instruction be more effective? The American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE) annual conference proceedings (1996–1999) contain 42 papers that treat engineering ethics as a coherent educational objective. Some of these papers disclose small components that seem to be part of a larger ethics curriculum. Other papers discuss engineering courses that are clearly the department's major ethics commitment. While it would be inappropriate to assume that the 42 papers represent the only means by which engineering students receive ethics instruction, these papers do present a variety of more‐or‐less defensible approaches and certainly the major intentional approaches of engineering curricula. This paper will develop an analysis of the 42 articles, including a discussion of where ethics is being taught (from both a chronological, and disciplinary perspective), and the six pedagogical approaches used to transfer an understanding of ethics to the student. These approaches include professional codes, humanist readings, theoretical grounding, ethical heuristics, case studies, and service learning. These six approaches will also be analyzed in terms of their promise to develop the ethical competencies needed by engineers.