Interrupted Case Method for Teaching Ethics in Transportation Engineering and Systems Management Course

The objective of this paper is to apply the Interrupted Case Method for Teaching Ethics to undergraduate Students in Transportation Engineering and Systems Management course. A Transportation Engineering Systems and Management course was taught in fall 2005 using a traditional lecture method. This course was used as the control group. In fall 2010 an experimental group was taught with an ethics component that counted for 15% of the grade. Performance of the control group was compared with that of the experimental (ethics) group. The average course grades for the control group and the experimental groups were 63% and 75% respectively. The course grades for the experimental group were 19% higher than those of the control group. 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 1) valuable insight into the ethical problems they will encounter as professionals and 2) a framework for making ethical decisions. The “Interrupted Case Method” represents much of the work conducted in engineering practice by encouraging students to refine their thoughts and processes as additional data is received. Twelve case studies involving problems that are commonly faced in engineering practice were taught in the course. The students received the data in four steps, one steps every three weeks. This “interrupted case method” gave the students opportunities to increase their ability to integrate material across many fields by 33%, critical thinking skills by 29%, and the ability to see alternative approaches by 27%. Introduction and Literature Review Miller and Coady 1 emphasized principles, values, and beliefs in addition to the willingness to work. Hudson 2 and Watras 3 stated that educators must demonstrate acceptable behavior and show proper courses of action in any given situation with respect to ethics. Science and engineering graduates are hands on professionals who are often responsible for and accountable in critical operational areas. They deal with customers, workplace hazards, safety standards, quality approval, and compliance with environmental laws. Each one of these and other operational areas can pose ethical issues. The development of new products and services in the 21 st century demands unprecedented interdisciplinary collaboration and teamwork. Scientists and engineers are actively involved from the concept design stage to the completion stage of a project requiring significant involvement in safety and environmental issues that have an impact not only on the workplace but also society at large 4 . Ethics is an important subject and should be an integral aspect of any scientist’s or engineer’s actions. However, very few teachers include ethics as a significant part of their courses. Over the past several years, engineering colleges have been formulating and implementing assessment and feedback processes for improving their curricula as required by the ABET accreditation criteria. Through these processes, many departments identified the need for improving the ethics components of their curricula. Since there is no consensus on learning objectives or pedagogical approaches for ethics education, faculty in many engineering colleges including the authors of this paper, have integrated ethics into their curricula rather than having students take a course in philosophy or ethics 5-7 . The ethical behavior of an individual becomes even more important as business, industry, and education fields are challenged to perform at optimum levels due to globalization and local competition 8 . Teaching examples involving ethical issues should preserve the open-ended, complex, and ambiguous character of problem situations. It is important for scientistsand engineers-intraining to understand the reasons for prevailing standards of ethics in their communities 9 .