Exploring the Perceptions of Professional Values among First-Year Engineering Students: A Cross-Cultural Comparison

In the engineering ethics education literature, there has recently been increasing interest in longitudinal studies of engineering students’ moral development. Understanding how first-year engineering students perceive ethics can provide baseline information critical for understanding their moral development during their subsequent journey in engineering learning. Existing studies have mainly examined how first-year engineering students perceive the structure and elements of ethics curricula, pregiven ethics scenarios, what personal ethical beliefs and specific political ideals they hold (e.g., fairness and political involvement), and institutional ethical climates. Complementary to existing studies, our project surveyed how first-year engineering students perceive professional ethical values. Specifically, we asked students to list the three most important values for defining a good engineer. This question responds to a gap in existing engineering ethics literature that engineering students’ perceptions (especially first-year students) of professional virtues and values are not sufficiently addressed. We argue that designing effective and engaged ethics education experiences needs to consider the professional values perceived by students and how these values are related to the values communicated in the engineering curriculum. This paper is part of a larger project that compares how engineering students develop moral reasoning and intuition longitudinally across three cultures/countries: the United States, Netherlands, and China. We hope that findings from this paper can be useful for engineering educators to reflect on and design subsequent ethics education programs that are more responsive to students’ perceptions of professional values when beginning an engineering program.