Application of interrupted case method for teaching ethics to graduate students in transportation engineering

Abstract

The objective of this study is to apply the Interrupted Case Method for Teaching Ethics to Graduate Students in a Transportation Engineering program course. A graduate course, "Intelligent Transportation Systems", was taught in fall 2008 using a traditional lecture method. This course was used as the control group. In spring 2011 an experimental group was taught with an ethics component that counted for 20% of the grade. The "Interrupted Case Method" models much of the work conducted in engineering by letting the students' thoughts and processes continually be refined as additional data is received. Ten case studies involving problems that are commonly faced in engineering practice, were taught in the experimental group. The students received the data in three steps with one step presented every four weeks. In this study the value of Teaching Ethics is documented. The improvements in grade and personal survey results indicate that this class provided the students with valuable insight into the ethical problems they will encounter as professional and a framework for making ethical decisions. Performance of the control group was compared with that of the experimental (ethics) group. The "interrupted case method" gave the students opportunities to increase their critical thinking skills (by 32%), flexibility (by 26%) and the ability to see alternative approaches (by28%). The average course grades for the control group and the experimental groups were 65 and 75 respectively. The experimental group showed 15.3% improvement over the control group. The improvement of the ethics group was statistically significant at an alpha value of 0.05. © 2012 American Society for Engineering Education.