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.