Educating the Whole Engineer: Building Character Through Mastery-Based Learning

To truly educate the Whole Engineer, we must rethink not just what we teach, but how we teach. Traditional engineering classrooms often rely on rigid, high-stakes testing that can inadvertently foster a culture of anxiety and competition.

Groundbreaking engineering education research reveals a powerful alternative: connecting student-centered learning environments with motivational psychology to build a more inclusive classroom culture and actively cultivate foundational character strengths.

A Pioneering Connection

This initiative marks the first published research to demonstrate a direct link between student-centered, mastery-based learning environments and the cultivation of personal character virtues in engineering students.

The Framework: Mastery, Motivation, and Virtue Ethics

By blending student-centered pedagogy with Achievement Goal Theory (a psychological framework for motivation), educators can shift a student's focus from merely "chasing a grade" to truly mastering a concept.

Rooted in the philosophical framework of Virtue Ethics, our study investigated how this psychological shift empowers students to take ownership of their education, naturally developing vital character strengths alongside technical excellence:

• Resilience: Developed by framing mistakes as essential data points in the learning process rather than permanent failures.

• Humility: Cultivated through collaborative, flipped-classroom environments where students recognize the value of peer insights and shared problem-solving.

• Courage: Fostered when students are given the psychological safety to tackle difficult engineering problems, ask questions, and take intellectual risks.

Inside the Classroom: The Flipped Thermal-Fluids Course

This research examines the design and deployment of a unique mastery-based learning model within a rigorous, sophomore-level engineering course. By restructuring traditional academic boundaries, the course engineered an environment built entirely for holistic student growth:

• Learning & Classroom Structures: Utilizing a flipped-classroom model, standard lectures were replaced with collaborative, team-based problem-solving sessions.

• Reward Structures: Shifting assessment systems away from high-stakes penalization toward progressive mastery, allowing students multiple pathways to demonstrate their understanding.

The Results & Implications for STEM

Assessment results and student reflections showcase overwhelming benefits. Beyond standard metrics like increased engagement, a stronger sense of belonging, and higher retention, promoting a mastery mindset fundamentally empowers the learner.

When students are freed from the fear of failure, they don't just become better technical problem solvers—they develop into resilient, courageous, and self-aware professionals prepared to lead in a complex world.

Read the full paper here

Educating the Whole Engineer: Shifting the Focus of Engineering Ethics

Engineering ethics has traditionally been taught as a matter of rule-following—memorizing checklists, identifying liabilities, and learning what not to do. But truly educating the Whole Engineer requires a more humanistic approach. Instead of treating ethics as a rigid set of constraints, we must look at it through the lens of character: Who do our engineers need to become?

By introducing Virtue Ethics to future engineering professionals, we can broaden their moral perspective and give them a richer framework for navigating the ambiguous, high-stakes ethical dilemmas they will face every day.

Decoding the Codes: What the Data Shows

To map out the moral foundation of modern engineering, our interdisciplinary research team—comprising three engineers and a philosopher—conducted a preliminary analysis of three prominent professional engineering codes of ethics:

• NSPE (National Society of Professional Engineers)

• IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers)

• SHPE (Society of Hispanic Professional Engineers)

Through a multi-rater review process, our team identified six core virtues currently deeply embedded in these professional guidelines:

Foundational Code VirtuesResponsibilityOwnership of project impacts and public welfare.IntegrityConsistency of actions, values, and principles.HonestyTruthfulness in data reporting and technical claims.TrustworthinessReliability to clients, employers, and the public.TeamworkCollaborative problem-solving and mutual respect.FairnessEquitable treatment of colleagues, workers, and communities.

Expanding the Horizon: The "Missing" Virtues

While the existing codes lay a strong foundation for professional compliance, they often overlook the aspirational qualities that drive true innovation and leadership. To educate an adaptable and resilient workforce, our research argues for making several "missing" virtues visible within engineering practice and education:

The Aspirational Virtues:

Bravery, Leadership, Curiosity, Creativity, Perseverance, Hope, and a Love of Learning.

By explicitly naming and valuing traits like curiosity and bravery alongside honesty and responsibility, we expand engineering ethics from a protective shield into a proactive force for good.

Moving Engineering Education Forward

Shifting the educational paradigm toward virtue ethics allows students to see themselves not just as technical data-processors, but as moral agents. It empowers future engineers to practice continuous personal development, ensuring they graduate with the character, resilience, and vision needed to design solutions for the genuine flourishing of society.

Educating the Whole Engineer: Rethinking Character in STEM Education

The sheer complexity of modern engineering requires far more than technical proficiency. Every day, engineers make critical decisions that directly impact public welfare, safety, and the betterment of society.

This reality forces us to ask fundamental questions about how we train upcoming professionals:

• What role should character education play in standard engineering curricula?

• How can we better prepare graduates to tackle messy, real-world problems with deeply rooted internal strengths?

• How do we intentionally cultivate virtues like integrity, humility, courage, purpose, empathy, resilience, curiosity, creativity, justice, authenticity, and practical wisdom?

This special session invites engineering faculty, computing educators, and industry leaders to step back and rethink how we can holistically educate the Whole Engineer by leveraging proven, evidence-based character education frameworks.

Session Objectives: From Reflection to Action

Rather than listening to passive lectures, participants in this session will actively collaborate to bridge the gap between character theory and classroom practice. The interactive workshop is structured around four main milestones:

1. Establish a Common Framework: Gain a shared, foundational understanding of modern character education and how it translates to technical fields.

2. Reflect on Curricular Purpose: Critically analyze the structural role character development should play across the four-year undergraduate engineering journey.

3. Brainstorm Practical Integration: Dynamically collaborate to identify concrete, low-lift ways to integrate character-building moments directly into existing STEM courses.

4. Drive Collective Impact: Formulate a shared vision and network of support for engineering educators committed to transforming the culture of technical education.

Join the Movement

We believe that engineering education shouldn't just produce workers who know how to calculate data—it should graduate whole individuals who know how to lead with wisdom and empathy. By connecting with a community of like-minded educators, you will walk away with actionable strategies to help your students recognize themselves as moral agents capable of designing a better, safer, and more flourishing world.

Educating the Whole Engineer: Shifting the Paradigm from Skills to Virtues

The modern engineering landscape presents challenges of unprecedented scope and complexity. To address these issues, future engineering professionals require a toolkit that extends far beyond technical calculations. They need robust collaboration, sharp problem-solving abilities, cultural awareness, persistent curiosity, and sound ethical decision-making.

While many engineering programs recognize these needs, they frequently hit a conceptual wall by treating these capacities merely as "professional skills."

Our research leverages an established framework—advanced by the Jubilee Centre for Character and Virtues—to analyze how virtues are already built into undergraduate STEM education, and why transforming our vocabulary from "skills" to "virtues" is the key to holistic student growth.

The Four Dimensions of Engineering Character

By conducting a comprehensive literature review, our study tracked how engineering educators currently weave essential character attributes into their courses. We broke these attributes down into four distinct virtue categories:

Virtue TypeCore Engineering ExemplarCurrent Educational FocusIntellectual VirtueCritical ThinkingDeep inquiry, parsing complex data, and challenging assumptions.Moral VirtueEmpathyUnderstanding the human impact of design and user needs.Civic VirtueServiceDirecting technical solutions toward public welfare and community good.Performance VirtueTeamworkExecuting group goals, communicating, and managing friction.

Skill vs. Virtue: Why the Distinction Matters

While the engineering education community actively teaches these four areas, they are almost universally labeled as "soft skills." While skills and virtues are practiced in similar ways, our research identifies four critical distinctions that reveal the massive added benefits of recasting these capacities as virtues:

1. Ordered to Morally Good Ends

A skill can be used for any purpose—an engineer can be a highly skillful communicator while actively deceiving a client. A virtue, by definition, is inherently tied to a morally good end and public welfare.

2. The Motivational Component

Skills tell an engineer how to do something, but they don't provide the internal drive to do it. Virtues possess a built-in motivational component; a virtuous engineer is intrinsically moved to act responsibly because it aligns with their character.

3. Navigating Conflicting Values

Traditional skill sets operate in isolation. Virtues, however, provide the ethical framework required to evaluate, weigh, and resolve messy, real-world conflicts when project constraints clash with societal needs.

4. Interconnected and Mutually Reinforcing

Skills are often siloed checkboxes. Virtues are deeply interconnected—as an engineer grows in empathy, it naturally enhances their capacity for service and teamwork, creating a self-sustaining cycle of personal development.

Practical Implications for STEM Educators

Shifting the educational narrative from skills to virtues gives engineering faculty access to a rich repository of proven pedagogical literature from character education.

Instead of rewriting technical syllabi from scratch, educators can use this framework to help students explicitly examine their personal values across a four-year undergraduate curriculum. This comprehensive, humanistic approach empowers future engineers to navigate complex real-world systems with an internal compass, ensuring they graduate equipped to design solutions that serve the genuine flourishing of society.

Educating the Whole Engineer: Reimagining Engineering Ethics

Ethics education is a mandatory requirement across undergraduate engineering programs. Yet, alarming data from engineering education research suggests a sobering reality: traditional college coursework often yields limited improvement—and in some cases, an actual diminishment—in students' moral commitments and ethical capacities over their four-year journey.

To understand why current methods are falling short, our research gauges the modern state of STEM ethics education, uncovering three sub-optimal characteristics that create systemic barriers to genuine student growth:

Three Pitfalls of Modern Engineering Ethics

• 1. Disconnected from Foundations: Standard engineering ethics modules rarely show clear links to a varied spectrum of ethical theories. Without these frameworks, students lack the foundational tools needed to guide systematic ethical reasoning and decision-making.

• 2. Hyper-Focused on Compliance: Current curricula place a heavy, lopsided emphasis on compliance and strict rule-following. This creates an environment of defensive liability management rather than helping students internalize deep moral values and virtues.

• 3. Over-Reliance on "Extreme" Cases: Lessons frequently rely on rare, catastrophic historical events—such as the 1986 NASA Space Shuttle Challenger disaster. While dramatic, these extreme case studies inadvertently reinforce the dangerous perception that morality is an infrequent professional concern, rather than a daily workplace reality.

The Compliance Gap: When we teach ethics purely as a protective shield against lawsuits or catastrophic failures, we fail to prepare students for the routine, subtle ethical crossroads they will face every single week of their professional careers.

The Alternative: Character Education for Aspirational Growth

To bridge these gaps, our research introduces Character Education as a vital, transformative approach to undergraduate engineering ethics.

Grounded in deep philosophical and psychological research, this framework moves past static checklists and focuses instead on developing virtuous dispositions. By training students to view themselves as moral agents, character education links professional responsibility directly to personal, professional, and societal flourishing.

Moving from "What Not to Do" to "Who to Become"

Traditional Compliance EthicsAspirational Character EthicsFocuses on static rules and penalties.Focuses on internal values and virtues.Built around rare, catastrophic disasters.Built around everyday professional dilemmas.Asks: "How do I avoid liability?"Asks: "How do I design for the greater good?"

Sketching the Future of STEM Curricula

What does character education look like in a real engineering classroom? It means weaving moral development directly into technical spaces. Instead of isolating ethics to a single senior seminar, it introduces everyday opportunities—such as peer code reviews, open-ended design constraints, and structured personal reflection—that challenge students to practice integrity, courage, and practical wisdom in real time.

By shifting our educational model from strict compliance to intentional character development, we can reverse the decline in student moral commitment. We can graduate an entirely new generation of holistically developed engineers equipped to protect public welfare, lead with empathy, and drive technical innovation for a flourishing world.