Does Education Have an Impact on Student Ethical Reasoning? Developing an Assessment of Ethical Reasoning for Engineering and Business Students

This paper outlines the development and assessment of ethical reasoning for Engineering and Business students at Arkansas Tech University.The main focus of this paper is to investigate the concept of how to teach ethics and assess in a cross-disciplinary fashion whether students are improving in how they reason their way through an ethical decision-making situation.The Defining Issues Test (DIT-2) and an internally developed assessment were used as instruments.For both instruments, students respond to questions about scenarios.The methodology was thoroughly described.The findings of the characteristics of the participants in these crossdisciplinary assessments have been carefully described in the tables and figures.The analysis compares responses across classes from freshmen to seniors and did not find statistically significant differences.