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The objective of this study is to apply the Interrupted Case Method for Teaching Ethics to Graduate Students in a Transportation Engineering program course. A graduate course, “Intelligent Transportation Systems”, was taught in fall 2008 using a traditional lecture method. This course was used as the control group. In spring 2011 an experimental group was taught with an ethics component that counted for 20% of the grade. The “Interrupted Case Method” models much of the work conducted in engineering by letting the students’ thoughts and processes continually be refined as additional data is received. Ten case studies involving problems that are commonly faced in engineering practice, were taught in the experimental group. The students received the data in three steps with one step presented every four weeks. In this study the value of Teaching Ethics is documented. The improvements in grade and personal survey results indicate that this class provided the students with valuable insight into the ethical problems they will encounter as professional and a framework for making ethical decisions. Performance of the control group was compared with that of the experimental (ethics) group. The “interrupted case method” gave the students opportunities to increase their critical thinking skills (by 32%), flexibility (by 26%) and the ability to see alternative approaches (by28%). The average course grades for the control group and the experimental groups were 65 and 75 respectively. The experimental group showed 15.3% improvement over the control group. The improvement of the ethics group was statistically significant at an alpha value of 0.05. Introduction and Literature Review According to Gilbert 1 work ethics is the willingness to work with appropriate material rewards. Miller and Coady 2 emphasize principles, values, and beliefs in addition to the willingness to work. Hudson 3 and Watras 4 state that educators must demonstrate acceptable behavior and show proper courses of action in any given situation with respect to ethics. Gregson 5 suggests that work ethics must be taught. Kohlberg and Piaget 6 propose critical moral developmental theories for teaching work ethics. Why a large percentage of the course material needs to focus on ethics? The issue of ethics has become a popular topic over the past decade. There is a growing trend for incorporating ethics throughout the engineering curriculum mainly due to assessment issues. Engineering graduates often responsible and accountable in critical operational areas. They deal with customers, workplace hazards, safety standards, quality approval, and compliance with environmental laws. Each one of these and other operational areas can pose ethical issues. For example in the quality approval area the engineer might be the responsible for maintaining records for continued certification, approving parts for selling or buying, all of which involve P ge 25193.5 ethical issues. The development of new products and services in the 21 st century demands unprecedented interdisciplinary collaboration and teamwork. Engineers are actively involved from the concept design stage which requires more involvement in product safety and environmental issues that have impact not only on workplace but also society at large 7 . Ethics is an important subject and should be an integral aspect of every engineer’s actions. However, very few teachers include ethics as a significant part of graduate programs. Over the past several years, engineering colleges have been formulating and implementing assessment and feedback processes for improving their curricula as required by the ABET accreditation criteria. Through these processes, many departments identified a need to improve the ethics components of their curricula. Since there is no consensus on learning objectives or pedagogical approaches for ethics education, faculty in many engineering colleges, including the authors of this paper, have integrated ethics into their curricula rather than having students take a course in philosophy or ethics 8-10 . Work ethics play a significant role for producing good students and workers at all levels. The ethical behavior of an individual becomes even more important as business, industry, and education fields are challenged to perform at optimum level due to globalization and local competition 11 . The authors agree with Herreid ’ s argument that the best technique for using cases is the “Interrupted Case Method.” This process exposes the students to the situations encounters by engineers letting the students’ thoughts and processes continually be refined as additional data is received 12 .

Application of Interrupted Case Method for Teaching Ethics to Graduate Students in Transportation Engineering