Assessing the Self-Efficacy Level of Freshmen on Ethical Research and Practices in Engineering

Prior research shows that ethical misconduct occurs in all sectors of science and engineering, including laboratory-based research, engineering design, and data science and modeling. Problems have arisen at individual and across organizations. Many of the recent unethical incidents in scientific research involve data fabrication and falsification, data tampering, plagiarism, intellectual theft, and misinformation. A few examples of recently reported unethical behaviors in engineering in industry include the delayed response in the GM ignition switch failure case, the diesel emission software manipulation case at Volkswagen, and the lack of attention to user privacy by companies such as Facebook. These problems arise from numerous sources. One is insufficient ethical policies at the leadership level, as prior research has reported a positive correlation between companies' success and strong ethical policies at that level. Yet the idea that these problems can be solved solely at the leadership level seems flawed, as it is difficult to transfer ethical practices from the leadership to their team members if the latter have a weak or flawed understanding of what ethical responsibility entails, if without a proper ethical research efficacy assessment method and improvement plan. This paper presents preliminary findings from a National Science Foundation (NSF) funded project on ethical and responsible research (ER2) in science and engineering. More specifically, the NSF project aims to enhance ethical self-efficacy and competence in undergraduate engineering students through curricular interventions. While the overall goal of the NSF project also includes development of a validated scale to assess the ethical self-efficacy and competency of engineering students, the objective of this paper is limited to conduct a survey of first-year engineering students at Texas A&M University to establish baseline results for future work. Furthermore, based on the survey results, the paper also investigates differences in the ethical self-efficacy level of students based on their demographic attributes and high school education on ethics.