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Engineering Commons

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Materials Science and Engineering

California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo

Focus groups and interviews

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Full-Text Articles in Engineering

Work In Progress - A Mixed-Methods Approach To Developing An Instrument Measuring Engineering Students' Positive Ethical Behavior, Mathew A. Holsapple, Cynthia J. Finelli, Donald D. Carpenter, Trevor S. Harding, Janel A. Sutkus Sep 2009

Work In Progress - A Mixed-Methods Approach To Developing An Instrument Measuring Engineering Students' Positive Ethical Behavior, Mathew A. Holsapple, Cynthia J. Finelli, Donald D. Carpenter, Trevor S. Harding, Janel A. Sutkus

Materials Engineering

Ethics education and the drive to produce ethical professional engineers is an important focus of one body of research on engineering education. This research often defines the positive outcome of ethics education as students and professional engineers choosing not to engage in unethical behavior. This paper discusses a portion of a larger research project and details efforts to identify and validate a definition of ethical behavior that includes the decision to engage in a positive behavior, defined as a service to a larger community. Through a series of interviews and focus groups with engineering administrators, faculty, and students, the authors …


Work In Progress – Building The Survey Of Engineering Ethical Development (Seed) Instrument, Janel A. Sutkus, Donald D. Carpenter, Cynthia J. Finelli, Trevor S. Harding Oct 2008

Work In Progress – Building The Survey Of Engineering Ethical Development (Seed) Instrument, Janel A. Sutkus, Donald D. Carpenter, Cynthia J. Finelli, Trevor S. Harding

Materials Engineering

When developing surveys, researchers can readily identify the concepts they intend to study, but how do they create individual survey items that will most accurately measure those concepts? Here we describe the first year of a four-year NSF project in which the E3 Team (Exploring Ethical Decision Making in Engineering) prepared to develop a national survey of the curricular and cocurricular activities, events, and experiences affecting the ethical development of engineering undergraduates. As this survey is likely to be the most comprehensive assessment of ethical development - both in content and scope - ever administered to engineering undergraduates, it …