Which courses influence engineering students' views of social responsibility?

Abstract

Many professional bodies are calling for engineering education to develop holistic engineers, trained in more than just technical content. Educational expectations include ethics and understanding social context, as well as attitudinal dispositions such as tolerance and thoughtfulness. These skills and dispositions add increased complexity and difficulty to the education of engineers beyond teaching only technical content. Moreover, there may be significant disconnects between what engineering faculty think they are teaching and what students are in fact learning. In looking at student learning versus faculty teaching, student responses to an open ended question about which, if any, courses had been influential to their views of social responsibility were examined. The ways in which engineers see their role in society, their social responsibility, is seen as one way to examine larger student views which may positively or negatively influence many of the professional and attitudinal dispositions which are now goals of engineering education.