Student ethical reasoning confidence pre/post an innovative makerspace course: A survey of ethical reasoning.

BACKGROUND

Challenges today are complex and rapid innovations are required. We instruct a transdisciplinary undergraduate course where engineering, nursing, and pre-professional health students produce tangible innovative solutions to community health challenges using MakerSpace technologies. Students receive evidence-based ethics instruction as part of the course using the 8 Key Questions for improving ethical reasoning. Design thinking, an empathy-based problem solving technique, was used to teach problem solving and provided context for instructing ethical reasoning.

OBJECTIVE

The Objective of this research was to assess student ethical reasoning pre/post this course where students concurrently produce innovative products.

DESIGN/PARTICIPANTS: Undergraduate students were assessed pre/post course for their perceptions of 1) the importance of, and 2) their confidence in their ability to ethically reason using a digital version of the Survey of Ethical Reasoning, an instrument previously tested in this population.

RESULTS

Participants demonstrated a significant gain in their ethical reasoning confidence and maintained their high ranking of the importance of ethical reasoning concurrently to producing innovative products.

CONCLUSIONS

It is possible, with deliberate instruction, for transdisciplinary undergraduate students to develop ethical reasoning confidence concurrently to developing innovative products.