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Professional communities are experiencing scandals involving unethical and illegal practices daily. Yet it should not take a national major structure failure to highlight the importance of ethical awareness and behavior, or the need for the development and practice of ethical behavior in engineering students. Development of ethical behavior skills in future engineers is a key competency for engineering schools as ethical behavior is a part of the professional identity and practice of engineers. While engineering educators have somewhat established instructional methods to teach engineering ethics, they still rely heavily on teaching ethical awareness, and pay little attention to how well ethical awareness predicts ethical behavior. However the ability to exercise ethical judgement does not mean that students are ethically educated or likely to behave in an ethical manner. This paper argues measuring ethical judgment is insufficient for evaluating the teaching of engineering ethics, because ethical awareness has not been demonstrated to translate into ethical behavior. The focus of this paper is to propose a model that correlates with both, ethical awareness and ethical behavior. This model integrates the theory of planned behavior, person and thing orientation, and spheres of control. Applying this model will allow educators to build confidence and trust in their students' ability to build a professional identity and be prepared for the engineering profession and practice.

Analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of current efforts indicate that engineering programs lack consistent, accurate, and reliable methods of teaching professional ethics and measuring their outcomes. This raises two equally important issues: how we teach ethics and which student outcomes we are assessing. Engineering students are performing poorly on the Ethics part of the Fundamental Engineering exam, so clearly there is a misalignment between teaching practice and outcomes. Engineering ethics instruction is often focused on the instruction of moral judgment and assessing ethical awareness via students' responses to vignettes describing ethical dilemmas. In this study, we propose extending current practice from a focus on teaching moral reasoning to also considering students' ethical awareness and future behavior. We introduce motivational variables that engineering educators should consider when designing ethics curricula. The study findings suggest that these motivational factors may influence students' ethical awareness and predict their ethical behavior. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Background Encouraging student involvement in undergraduate research may be a way institutions can foster pursuit of research as a career. This article examines how engineering students' interests combine with perceived faculty encouragement to influence their plans for involvement in undergraduate and professional research. Purpose/Hypothesis Individuals orient differently to people and things in their environments. We examine how thing and person orientations affect undergraduates' interest in engineering research. We hypothesize that thing orientation will be directly related to interest in an engineering research career, but that person orientation will have an indirect effect through student perceptions of faculty encouragement and student intentions to participate in undergraduate research. Design/Method Engineering undergraduates from a research-intensive university provided data about their interests in things and people, perceptions of faculty encouragement to participate in research, and intentions to pursue undergraduate research and research careers. Results Thing orientation directly predicts research career intentions in engineering. Person orientation has an indirect effect on career interests through greater perceptions of faculty encouragement to participate in undergraduate research. Perceptions of encouragement translate into greater intentions to participate in undergraduate research and then greater interest in pursuing a research career. Conclusions Both thing and person orientations influence the plans and intentions of engineering students. Perceived faculty encouragement and participation in undergraduate research are important predictors of students' interest in pursuing a research career. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]