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Does Studying ‘Ethics’ Improve Engineering Students’ Meta-Moral Cognitive Skills?

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Abstract

This study examines the assumption that training in professional ethics is a predictor of the meta-moral cognitive ability of engineering students. The main purpose of the study was to check the difference in the meta-moral cognitive abilities between those students who studied a course on professional ethics, as part of the engineering curriculum, and those who did not undertake such a course. Using the survey method, the author conducted a pilot study amongst 243 engineering undergraduates. The meta-moral cognitive awareness inventory developed on the basis of the meta-cognitive awareness inventory prepared by Schraw Gregory and Dennison Rayne Sperling was used to measure the meta-moral cognitive level of the respondents. The results show that there was a substantial difference in the meta-moral cognitive abilities between those students who studied professional ethics, and those who did not. The univariate analysis of variance of the collected data reveals a significant variance (p = .017).

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Acknowledgements

The author wishes to acknowledge the contributions of three engineering graduates (Ranajoy Roy, Prakhar Sinha and Hanish Gupta) in helping to collect the data for the study.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, BITS Pilani, K.K. Birla Goa Campus, Zuarinagar, Goa, 403726, India

    Reena Cheruvalath

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  1. Reena Cheruvalath
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Correspondence to Reena Cheruvalath.

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Cheruvalath, R. Does Studying ‘Ethics’ Improve Engineering Students’ Meta-Moral Cognitive Skills?. Sci Eng Ethics 25, 583–596 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11948-017-0009-x

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