Presentation
We Can’t Get No Satisfaction!: The Relationship between Students’ Ethical Reasoning and their Satisfaction with Engineering Ethics Education
2011 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition
(2011)
Abstract
We can’t get no satisfaction!: The relationship between students’ ethical reasoning and their satisfaction with engineering ethics education In a time of constricting budgets and growing demands from students, student satisfaction is often a factor in deciding which educational programs continue to be supported and funded.Program and course evaluations often rely on student satisfaction reports rather than more sophisticated assessments of effectiveness, and published engineering education research uses student satisfaction as an outcome in evaluating education interventions and types of courses.Satisfaction has also been linked to student motivation and retention.Little research, however, has been done to analyze which student characteristics and experiences predict satisfaction with any type of higher education program, and this question is absent in the published research on professional engineering ethics education. In this paper, we examine the following research question: How do student characteristics, experiences, and ethical development predict satisfaction with professional engineering ethics education? This study is part of a larger investigation of ethics education in engineering programs at 18 institutions of differing Carnegie classifications, geographic location, and student characteristics.We analyzed survey data collected from a stratified random sample of engineering students(n=3914) at these institutions. Students completed questions related to measures of three types of ethical development: knowledge of ethics, ethical reasoning, and ethical behavior. In addition,they provided demographic information, details about their ethics education, and reported their satisfaction with their professional engineering ethics education to date. We use analysis of variance (ANOVA) to compare the ethical reasoning scores – as measured by Rest and colleagues’ Defining Issues Test-2 – of students who reported being “very satisfied,”“satisfied,” “unsatisfied,” and “very unsatisfied” with their engineering ethics education. The test demonstrates that students with higher levels of ethical reasoning are less satisfied with their ethics education than their peers with lower levels of ethical reasoning, and we find significant differences between all four groups of students. The score of students who were “very dissatisfied” with their education was more than 0.280 standard deviations higher than those who were “very satisfied. ”With the results of the ANOVA as a starting point, we explore other systematic differencesamong students based on their satisfaction with their engineering ethics education. Using anordered logistic regression model with the four levels of satisfaction as the outcome, we examinethe effect of student demographics, characteristics of students’ ethics instruction, and otherstudent characteristics and experiences on self-reported satisfaction with ethics education.Preliminary results suggest that factors including gender, class year, and amount and type ofethics instruction predict students’ level of satisfaction. Finally, we re-examined the relationship between ethical reasoning and satisfaction within the context of this regression model to determine the nature of that relationship after controlling for these other factors – allowing us to conclude that even while taking into account other variables, satisfaction with ethics instruction is inversely related to ethical reasoning, an intended outcome of that instruction. We conclude the paper by offering practical suggestions for making ethics instruction both effective and satisfying to students.
Disciplines
Publication Date
June 26, 2011
Location
Vancouver, BC
Comments
© 2011 American Society for Engineering Education. Other scholars may excerpt or quote from these materials with the same citation. When excerpting or quoting from Conference Proceedings, authors should, in addition to noting the ASEE copyright, list all the original authors and their institutions and name the host city of the conference
Citation Information
Holsapple, M., & Sutkus, J. A., & Carpenter, D. D., & Finelli, C. J., & Burt, B. A., & Ra, E., & Harding, T. S., & Bielby, R. M. (2011, June), We Can’t Get No Satisfaction!: The Relationship between Students’ Ethical Reasoning and their Satisfaction with Engineering Ethics Education Paper presented at 2011 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition, Vancouver, BC. https://peer.asee.org/18508