Abstract
To assess ethics pedagogy in science and engineering, we developed a new tool called the Engineering and Science Issues Test (ESIT). ESIT measures moral judgment in a manner similar to the Defining Issues Test, second edition, but is built around technical dilemmas in science and engineering. We used a quasi-experimental approach with pre- and post-tests, and we compared the results to those of a control group with no overt ethics instruction. Our findings are that several (but not all) stand-alone classes showed a significant improvement compared to the control group when the metric includes multiple stages of moral development. We also found that the written test had a higher response rate and sensitivity to pedagogy than the electronic version. We do not find significant differences on pre-test scores with respect to age, education level, gender or political leanings, but we do on whether subjects were native English speakers. We did not find significant differences on pre-test scores based on whether subjects had previous ethics instruction; this could suggest a lack of a long-term effect from the instruction.
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Notes
Although the ESIT does not include the word “Defining” for brevity, the structure follows that of the DIT-2 and is designed to measure moral judgment.
Note that approval was obtained from Georgia Tech’s Institutional Review Board (IRB) for human subjects research prior to the beginning of the study.
The U.S. Government course is the only one that did not offer the students credit for participating, and it is also the only class with a high number of freshmen, both of which may explain why there are few subjects from this class who completed the full experiment.
The developers of the DIT and DIT-2 assessment tools for general moral reasoning accumulated results on the validity of their instrument through several decades of administering the test to respondents of all ages and professions. We plan to add to these results as the test continues to be used by ourselves and others.
We are developing and testing an assessment instrument called the Test of Ethical Sensitivity in Science and Engineering (TESSE). Please contact the authors for further information.
Please contact the authors for the most recent version of ESIT or to be on a distribution list for future tests.
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Acknowledgments
This research was funded in part by a grant from the College of Engineering Undergraduate Initiative at the Georgia Institute of Technology, and in part by a Focused Research Program grant from the Office of the Vice Provost for Research at the Georgia Institute of Technology. In addition, Dr. Swann was supported in part by NSF DMI-0348532. We would like to acknowledge Dr. Harry Sharp for his help with developing the scanning form for the test and converting tests to raw data and Mr. Andy Haleblian for his help in creating the electronic version of the ESIT.
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Borenstein, J., Drake, M.J., Kirkman, R. et al. The Engineering and Science Issues Test (ESIT): A Discipline-Specific Approach to Assessing Moral Judgment. Sci Eng Ethics 16, 387–407 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11948-009-9148-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11948-009-9148-z