Investigating the Impact of Scaffolded Ethics Autobiography on Engineering Identity and Students' Career Interests

This project aims to serve the national interest by designing, implementing, and evaluating a new engineering education pedagogy called Scaffolded Ethics Autobiography (SEA), through which engineering students construct their own moral narratives, the stories of their moral lives. SEA is assumed to promote students’ professional engineering identity, which is an engineering identity with explicit ethics components. Engineering educators have explored how to help students shape engineering identity, as it is believed to be associated with persistence in the profession. At the same time, undergraduate engineering programs must include instruction in professional ethics to meet accreditation criteria. This project will bridge the separate efforts to facilitate engineering students’ engineering identity development and professional ethical development through SEA, which opens new possibilities to effectively achieve both goals. This project will help engineering students grow as ethical engineers with strong intentions to persist in engineering careers, which aligns with significant national interests. In Phase 1, this project will design the SEA module, including the necessary materials for the SEA module implementation, such as module description and the assessment rubric, after constructing a new model of professional engineering identity. In Phase 2, this project will evaluate the effectiveness of the SEA module in promoting engineering students' moral narratives and professional engineering identity development. Existing measures in engineering identity and newly developed assessment rubric will be used for the evaluation. In Phase 3, this project will connect the SEA module with engineering students' career decisions, by examining how engineering students' engineering identity, whose development will be facilitated by the SEA module, is related to their career choices. The NSF IUSE: EDU Program supports research and development projects to improve the effectiveness of STEM education for all students. Through the Engaged Student Learning track, the program supports the creation, exploration, and implementation of promising practices and tools. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.