Ethical reflection or critical thinking? Overlapping competencies in engineering ethics education

Abstract

Ethical reflection is considered to be an important competency for engineering ethics education. However it has no clear definition, which makes it difficult to effectively incorporate it into engineering ethics education. This paper proposes an operationalisation of ethical reflection into four learning goals which can help educators explicitly and systematically assess ethical reflection when using case-based exercises in the engineering ethics classroom. The four components were adapted from established educational approaches for critical thinking and then expanded to apply to normative propositions, the specific domain of ethical reflection.