Reflection to support ethics learning in an interdisciplinary challenge-based learning course

Designing qualitative reflection in (first-year’s) engineering (ethics) education is challenging. We developed a reflection activity in a challenge-based learning course, based on three open questions, a weekly coaching session and a weekly coaching assignment. We use two models (ethics goals model and pedagogical component model) to analyze (1) what the effectiveness is of the reflection method, (2) how the students’ learning gains are distributed in this reflection, and (3) what the usefulness of these models is to analyze the reflection of a CBL course. We conducted a qualitative analysis, where data were drawn from weekly reflections written by 41 students participating in the course E3Challenge2. Using the text-search query by ATLAS.ti, we identified 180 relevant excerpts about ethics and 34 about coaching. Through an iterative and collaborative process, the excerpts were analyzed thematically and categorized under 12 themes describing students’ attainment of ethics learning goals. We describe (1) that the method provided in-depth reflections of the students but is not scalable, (2) a distribution of different ethics goals, and (3) strengths and gaps (epistemology, pedagogical) of the two models in the use of reflective evaluation. We conclude with a plea to use the models in evaluation of reflection methods and with possible further research for the ethics goal model.