Development of Situational Judgment Tests to Educate the Whole Engineer and Assess Complex Character-Based Ethical Decision-Making

This full research paper describes a process to develop a ten-question situational judgement test (SJT) informed by engineering professional experiences and targeted at measuring character via four-response prompts. Cultivating Character in Engineering (CCE) has been a goal of our research team since 2017. In this paper, we describe the process of developing SJTs as assessment tools to cultivate character. More specifically, we assessed the nuanced character-based ethical decision-making via SJTs of three distinct groups - first-year engineering students, early career engineering professionals, and expert engineering professionals. SJTs are multiple choice tests designed to provide learners with complex scenarios derived from real-world practice that do not have clear right and wrong answers. These tests have been well established as assessment tools particularly in medical education and in business education. Empirical studies of SJTs in undergraduate medical education have corroborated that SJT scores are more predictive of learners' future behaviors and actions than traditional standardized test questions. Development of SJTs in engineering have been limited to targeting competencies around global competency and metacognition, but they could effectively be developed to address and assess more comprehensive and applied character-based ethical decision-making and related core competencies. This study presents the process and findings from the preliminary development of a CCE-SJT for engineering. Findings reveal that SJTs can differentiate between students, early career professionals and expert engineers indicating that SJTs can be used to assess the trajectory of student learning of nuanced ethical decision-making.