Abstract
This study explores how peer advising affects student project teams’ discussions of engineering ethics. Peer ethics advisors from non-engineering disciplines are expected to provide diverse perspectives and to help engineering student teams engage and sustain ethics discussions. To investigate how peer advising helps engineering student teams’ ethics discussions, three student teams in different peer advising conditions were closely observed: without any advisor, with a single volunteer advisor, and with an advising team working on the ethics advising project. Micro-scale discourse analysis based on cognitive ethnography was conducted to find each team’s cultural model of understanding of engineering ethics. Cultural-historical activity theory (CHAT) analysis was also conducted to see what influenced each team’s cultural model. In cultural model, the engineering team with an ethics advising team showed broader understanding in social implications of engineering. The results of CHAT analysis indicated that differences in rules, community, and division of labor among three teams influenced the teams’ cultural models. The CHAT analysis also indicated that the peer advisors working on the ethics advising project and the engineering team working on engineering design project created a collaborative environment. The findings indicated that collaborative environment supported peer ethics advising to facilitate team discussions of engineering ethics.
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Notes
According to the instructor of their Senior Design course, however, this safety switch did not make it into their final product. This could be for any number of reasons, including time pressures and technical issues. Nevertheless, the observed impact on their ethical decision-making remains the phenomenon of interest.
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This work was supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 1338735.
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Lee, E.A., Gans, N., Grohman, M. et al. Guiding Engineering Student Teams’ Ethics Discussions with Peer Advising. Sci Eng Ethics 26, 1743–1769 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11948-020-00212-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11948-020-00212-6