Ethical and Responsible Research Program (ER2) at the US National Science Foundation
Moderator: Wenda Bauchspies, NSF Program Director for Ethical and
Responsible Research
Introduction: Katherine Duncan, IEEE-USA President
A. The Ethics and Responsible Research Program at NSF: Future Directions – Wenda Bauchspies
The first presentation will introduce the ER2’s goals and funding priorities.
B. OEC’s Community of Practice for Scholars, Educators and Administrators Fostering Research Integrity – Julie Simpson
The second presentation will introduce the Online Ethics Center originally funded by NSF to support training and research of ethics in STEM. The presentation will focus on its new initiative for building communities of practice that support social responsibility through ethical research.
C. Collaborative Research: Enhancing Internships with Professional Ethics Training: Cultivating an Ethical Engineer Identity – Grisselle Centeno and Kingsley A. Reeves, Jr.
The project by Centeno and Reeves seeks to create a novel pedagogical approach that merges engineering ethics training in an academic setting with engineering internships in an industry setting to: 1) promote the development of strong ethical sensitivity and reasoning skills within students (i.e. ethical competence), and 2) promote the establishment of ethical competence as a core competence associated with the engineer identity.
D. Collaborative Research: Early Career Engineers’ Views of Ethics and Social Responsibility: Trends, Influences, and Contexts – Brent Jesiek, Stephanie Claussen and Carla Zoltowski
The fourth presentation by Jesiek, Claussen and Zoltowski will give an overview of a longitudinal study investigating how engineering professionals’ views of ethics and social responsibility evolve over time, from when they first begin their engineering studies to when they graduate and enter the workforce.
E. Collaborative Research: Responsible Engineering across Cultures: Investigating the Effects of Culture and Education on Ethical Reasoning and Dispositions of Engineering Students – Qin Zhu and Scott Streiner
The project by Qin and Scott approaches social responsibility from a global and (cross-)cultural perspective by examining how national cultures and educational experiences affect the ways in which engineering students from three countries (the United States, Netherlands, and China) make sense of their social responsibilities and develop their professional ethical identities.