As engineers enter the workplace, they must not only be aware of the existing ethical standards required to become a professional engineer, but they must also be prepared to reason through ethical problems and act appropriately in their everyday work. However, recent research has shown that the traditional curricular approaches used to develop these skills in engineering undergraduates - notably case studies and emphasis on ethical codes - do not have as great an impact on students' ability to address ethical issues as expected. It is therefore the intention of this study to evaluate a number of different curricular approaches to ethics education (e.g. roleplaying activities, games, or films) that could be used to prepare students for ethical issues and to assess their impacts on students' ethical reasoning ability. Additionally, we test the differential impact of curricular approaches, regardless of the type, related to the depth of cognitive processing required during the experience. While previous work has evaluated different curricular approaches to engineering education, this study contributes to the discourse by conducting quantitative analysis on data collected from a variety of engineering programs across the United States. This approach will allow for a more general understanding of both the current state of ethics education in engineering and based on the relationships between curricular experiences and outcomes related to ethical development.
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