Development of an Ethics Survey Based on the Four-domain Development Diagram

This research paper presents the development of a survey for students based on the four-domain development diagram (4DDD) by Vanasupa and others . There are many challenges for engineering faculty to successfully incorporate ethics education into their courses and programs. Lack of formal training in ethics among engineering faculty, limited space in overcrowded curricula, and difficulty with how to assess students on ethical development are just a few. This work seeks to address the third noted challenge through a student survey based on the 4DDD. The goal was to develop a survey for educators to assess the extent to which students perceived that their learning experience encompassed elements believed to foster ethical development. This survey was distributed to targeted courses as part of a case study exploration of ethics education at 12 institutions in the 2017-2018 academic year. Courses varied from first-year to senior level from multiple disciplines. Some courses mixed engineering and non-engineering students. The ethics inclusion in the course ranged from a single activity to full 3-credit ethics courses. Student surveys that completed all items in a given construct were used in the statistical analysis, ranging from 313 to 393 responses. Preliminary evidence of reliability was explored through Cronbach’s Alpha for internal consistency with strong evidence found for each of the six constructs. Evidence of validity based on survey content was examined through consensus building on construct items as they relate to ethics and ethics education. However, validity evidence based on internal structure as measured through Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) was weak. Future work could remove items that showed weaker correlations with their construct, and responses to this revised survey might show improved reliability and/or validity. Introduction Engineers’ work has wide ranging impacts on communities and individuals, making it imperative that engineers. Broadly, ethics can be divided into two main foci; micro-ethics, which focuses on an individual’s behavior, and macro-ethics, which focuses more on the social responsibilities of the profession as a whole. Creating learning environments in engineering programs is a critical step in developing engineers that practice in ethical ways. There are many challenges for engineering faculty, however, regarding the ethics education of engineering students. Previous work has highlighted barriers to effective ethics education including a lack of student engagement, working ethics into overcrowded curriculum, faculty with limited knowledge or training around ethics, difficulty in assessing ethical competency and fostering learning environments that effectively mirror “real world” applications . Additionally, research has highlighted discrepancies between faculty perceptions of their ethics education and student experiences of those interventions . This study found that while faculty thought they were presenting complex and nuanced ethical problems to students, students were perceiving the ethics situations being studied as simplistic, with black and white or right and wrong answers. Additionally, faculty believed that they modeled ethical behavior to their students as part of their ethics education, but students did not consider their professors as role models in this way. These challenges point to the importance of fostering a learning environment that is conducive to effective ethics education and learning for students, in alignment with faculty goals and expectations. To this end, Vanasupa and others created the Four Domain Development Diagram (4DDD) . The goal of the 4DDD is to guide the design of learning environments to foster students’ holistic development. The authors described how moral and ethical development could result from learning environments that intentionally incorporates the cognitive, psychomotor, affective, and social domains. Drawing from self-determination theory, the core of the 4DDD is a motivational cycle that leverages student perceptions of value, interest and autonomy. Surrounding student motivation are the contextual elements that can be designed to help foster effective learning. These contextual elements include students’ perception of connection with their classmates (relatedness), experiencing engagement through active learning, developing mastery of the material which includes understanding the broader context of the topic being discussed and using systems thinking tools to engage in more complex understandings of the topic. Finally, the 4DDD focuses on how these motivational and contextual elements can foster the moral and ethical development of students by looking holistically at student attitudes, the learning environment and exposure to ethics. Student moral and ethical development can be broken down further into three constructs: knowledge of ethics, ethical reasoning, and ethical behavior . Knowledge of ethics refers to a broad awareness and understanding of base ethical principles. This level of awareness parallels what is assessed by the NCEES Fundamentals of Engineering examination and traditionally focuses on micro-ethical behavior aligned with the engineering codes of ethics. Ethical reasoning reaches further to focus on students’ ability to apply moral theories or logical arguments to reason through ethical situations. This construct focuses more on participants level of moral judgement than just their knowledge. Finally, ethical behavior focuses on realized or hypothetical responses to ethical situations. Relevant issues pertaining to ethical behavior for students may include cheating, volunteerism, or boundaries around shared work on course assignments. The challenge of creating effective learning environments for ethics education in engineering forms the motivation for this work. Drawing from the 4DDD model, this paper presents a description of the creation and reliability/validity measures of a survey instrument that faculty could use to assess their learning environments to promote positive ethical and moral development in students. The goal is that this instrument could not only provide assessment, but also guide the intentional creation of the learning environments from early on which draw from the 4DDD. With a focus on desired outcomes and confidence in an ability to assess then, these improved learning environments could promote better ethics education in engineering students. Instrument Development The development of this assessment tool is rooted in a modified version of the 4DDD model that is simplified and includes the three constructs of ethical and moral development from Finelli et al. . A diagram of the modified 4DDD model is shown in Figure 1. Six constructs from the modified 4DDD were targeted in this survey including student’s 1) interest in ethics, 2) perceptions of the value of ethics education, 3) feelings of autonomy in the classroom activities related to ethics, 4) feelings of connection or relatedness with their classmates, 5) perceptions of their own competence when it comes to ethical issues and 6) understanding of systems thinking as it relates to ethical issues. Figure 1. Modified Four Domain Development Diagram (original diagram from ) The survey included 33 items, 4 to 6 per construct, with about half of the items adapted from existing survey instruments and the other half developed by the research team. All items for this instrument and the associated constructs are given in the Appendix. All items for the Interest and Value constructs were developed collaboratively and iteratively by the research team. The items for the Autonomy and Relatedness constructs came entirely from the Work-related Basic Need Satisfaction scale . The original scale was developed using data from students, researchers, human resources employees and call center agents, all from the Netherlands and draws from Self-Determination Theory as the theoretical framework. Structural Equation Modeling (EFA and CFA) was used to examine evidence of validity and showed three clusters (autonomy, competence and relatedness), two of which were used in their entirety for this survey (autonomy and relatedness). Evidence of reliability showed strong internal consistency with alpha values above 0.8 for all clusters. Subsequent studies used this scale with Italian psychology students 8 and Turkish workers from the private sector 9 and both found evidence of strong reliability and validity in those varied contexts. No studies were found that used this scale with engineers or engineering students. Three of the four items for the Competence construct were adapted from the Intrinsic Motivation Inventory (IMI) which originally had six items associated with perceived competence. The other item was added by the research team. The IMI has been shown to have strong evidence of reliability and validity 10 and has been used in many studies across a diversity of contexts including with engineering students (ex. ). The items for the Systems Thinking construct were written by the authors, but were rooted in information from documents highlighting the main characteristics of systems thinking including 1) understanding the system from multiple perspectives, 2) understanding systems without getting stuck on details – a tolerance for ambiguity and uncertainty, 3) understanding the implications of proposed changes, 4) identifying conflicts between social, environmental, and economic priorities, and 5) identifying and critiquing underlying values associated with possible solutions . Drawing upon these base principles and assessment strategies for systems thinking, six items were developed by the research team and adapted to address systems thinking in the context of ethics and the societal impacts of engineering decisions. All items were presented as Likert-type items, with a seven-point scale of agreement from “1=Strongly Disagree” to “7=Strongly Agree.” Four