Exploring ethical decision-making in group settings with real-life case studies

Ethical decision-making has been recognised as an important goal of engineering ethics education. This goal has been formulated as enabling students to make decisions based on different ethical theories and frameworks [1], providing conceptual tools for students to recognize and counteract the potential threats of organizational practices [2], or helping students deal with ambiguity in decision-making situations [3]. EDMMs are a commonly taught theoretical base for ethical decision-making. Yet the focus has preponderantly been on students' responses to hypothetical, obvious and brief ethical dilemmas (vignettes), bracketing the group dimension or real features of the context of engineering practice [4]. This approach was shown to lead students to consider solely the perspective of the person making the decision, neglecting the stance of other stakeholders ([5], p.603). At the same time, studies exploring decision-making in STEM education group settings overlooked the ethical dimension of this process [6]. It is thus essential to introduce engineering students to ethical decision-making as situated practice [7], in a manner that can account for the complexities of real-life situations [8]. Our contribution examines students' emerging ethical decision-making process in a group setting when faced with a case (socio-technical problem) given by a stakeholder within their university's ecosystem. It is based on a Challenge-Based Learning course on Ethics and Data Analytics offered by a Dutch technological university in the spring of 2021. The research methods used are student interviews and document analysis of written assignments. The study aims to contribute to a better understanding of (i) how students move through the different steps of the decision-making process of finding an ethical solution to a real-life case, (ii) how they consider different stakeholder perspectives, (iii) the criteria and values guiding their decision-making, and (iv) how having a real case affects their view on the role of ethics in engineering decision-making. Bringing these processes to the forefront can guide engineering instructors in structuring the learning components of their course as to better support students' ethical reasoning. The study thus contributes to the limited body of evidence on how students engage in ethical decision-making in real-life contexts [9] and of the factors considered (Atesh et al., 2017).