This project develops the science of teaching engineering ethics by engaging students as expert witnesses in a litigation role play experience. Standard pedagogies expose students to broad ethical dilemmas that they may encounter in their careers and provide valuable practice in ethical reasoning related to these problems. Expert witness role plays have the potential to expand on this base of knowledge to help students develop awareness and practical skills to deal with the ethical challenges of maintaining scientific objectivity as an expert witness in their specifica area of study.
The intellectual merit of this research comes from extending an anecdotally successful role play experience based on reconstructing a traffic crash by developing five complete expert witness role plays and evaluating the efficacy of this approach in two institutions using both formative and summative evaluation techniques. The broader impact of this work includes developing a framework to aid other educators in developing expert witness role plays on additional engineering expert topics and disseminating the result of this project on commonly used ethics web portals to incorporate expert witness role plays in their own classrooms.
