2020 ASEE Virtual Annual Conference Content Access

Courses in professional development can be a catch-all to address student skill building in areas
such as technical writing, communication, career path reflection, and ethics. While each of
these skills is important to student development, the application of ethical thought in a
professional development course can be challenging. In our program, we have traditionally
taught ethics from the perspective of engineering case studies (such as the Ford Pinto case or
the Bhopal disaster). Students have traditionally been asked to write executive summaries and
participate in debates regarding these well-documented and dissected cases. The content and
related assignments have been considered separate from the career path agenda that is also
part of the course. While student feedback has been favorable, the goals of our program
include ensuring that students can apply ethical decision-making, rather than solely reflect on
historical case studies. To bridge the cognitive and affective domains, we have implemented
the use of student-written novellas. We hypothesize that students exhibit internalization of
ethical values by placing themselves in a future “self-oriented” situation. Students selected the
physical setting and timeline for their self-written novella; the primary stipulation was that
throughout the novella, the main character (the student) would be required to make a series of
decisions, related to materials science and sustainability, that required ethical analysis. Throughout the written assignment, which spanned 10 weeks, the instructor would offer writing prompts related to each student novella to infuse additional ethical situations into the product. Instructors and graduate students then applied a rubric assessing the application of ethics and compared the results to those from a traditional series of assignments from a previous offering of the course. In addition, students were surveyed to reflect upon their experiences in the course and their understanding of ethical principles. Rubrics and surveys were developed to probe both the cognitive domain(understanding of ethics) as well as the affective domain (applying decision-making in new, unfamiliar scenarios). We will present on these data as well as the structured approach for the assignment.