Governance
Beyond the Syllabus: The Foundation of Student Flourishing
At Educating the Whole Engineer, we believe that the true measure of a great program is not just the curriculum, but the integrity and purpose of the institution that supports it.
In an era where higher education governance often prioritizes administrative convenience, we have chosen a different path:
Character-Driven Governance. This approach places ethical decision-making, stakeholder collaboration, and, most importantly, student flourishing at the heart of everything we do—from curriculum design to advising models.
What is Character-Driven Governance?
Traditional academic governance can suffer from “character fragmentation,” where individuals’ virtues operate in isolation. Our model demands character integration, where a set of core virtues work synergistically to guide all major decisions:
Humanity: Prioritizing the holistic well-being and development of every student.
Justice: Ensuring fairness and equity in policies and opportunities.
Courage: The moral strength to make decisions that prioritize student needs over convenience or inertia.
Collaboration: Breaking down disciplinary silos to build a unified, supportive environment.
Judgment: Using evidence-based analysis to inform all pedagogical and curricular choices.
Our leaders and faculty consciously model ethical governance to achieve student flourishing.
The Results: Unprecedented Student Outcomes
The proof of our unique governance model is in the outcomes. By deliberately embedding character and student focus into our decision-making, we have achieved results that significantly outperform national trends.
Blueprint for Excellence
Our character-driven approach is evident in our systematic practices:
Systematic Stakeholder Engagement: Decisions are informed by input from students, faculty, industry, and the wider university community.
Evidence-Based Decisions: We continually assess and refine our pedagogy and curriculum based on learning science and student data.
Flexible Curricular Structures: Our program is designed for agility, allowing us to innovate quickly to meet the evolving needs of both our students and society.
By integrating these virtues into our leadership and governance, we have built a powerful exemplar for how higher education can successfully move beyond administrative norms to put student development first.
Governance with Heart: Building an Engineering Program on Character
Ready to join a program built on integrity and purpose? Download the paper today.
Beyond Compliance: Building Engineers of Character
In traditional engineering education, ethics is often treated as a set of rules to follow—a requirement to check off. But evidence shows this approach is insufficient, sometimes even resulting in a diminishment of students’ moral commitments during college.
At Educating the Whole Engineer, we know that technical excellence must be matched by ethical conviction. We have moved beyond the limitations of conventional ethics lessons to introduce Character Education— a framework that prepares you for the full spectrum of professional and social responsibility.
The Shortcomings of Traditional Engineering Ethics
Our analysis reveals three critical weaknesses in the conventional approach to ethics education, which we have intentionally corrected in our curriculum:
Missing Theory: Traditional ethics often fails to connect decisions to the robust ethical theories (like utilitarianism, deontology, etc.) that inform complex reasoning and decision-making.
Compliance-Heavy Focus: An emphasis on rule-following and avoiding legal trouble limits opportunities for internalizing deep moral values and virtues.
Extreme Case Studies: Lessons often revolve around rare, catastrophic failures (like the 1986 Challenger disaster). This reinforces a harmful perception that morality is an infrequent, extraordinary concern, rather than a daily professional responsibility.
Our Solution: Character Education and Virtue Ethics
We ground our ethics education in profound philosophical and psychological work on virtuous dispositions. This unique approach directly addresses the deficiencies of compliance-based teaching and focuses on developing the whole engineer.
How We Build Character
Character Education focuses on cultivating the virtues and moral capacities necessary for personal, professional, and societal flourishing.
This means we move from asking, “What rule did they break?” to asking, “What kind of engineer should I be?”
By integrating character education throughout the engineering curriculum, we ensure that ethics is not an isolated subject, but a central lens through which you approach all design, collaboration, and problem-solving. This focus helps the profession and its stakeholders by producing graduates who are not just technically capable, but are fundamentally prepared to lead with integrity and ensure technological solutions are always for the betterment of humanity. Be an engineer who is defined by technical skill and moral conviction.
Ethics, Reimagined: Cultivating the Engineer's Moral Compass
Ready to Learn More? Download the paper.
Preparing Engineers for Complexity and Purpose
The challenges facing modern society demand engineers with a capacity that extends far beyond technical knowledge.
To serve responsibly, the next generation of engineers needs a robust toolkit that includes:
Teamwork and Collaboration
Problem-Solving and Lifelong Learning
Cultural Awareness
Ethical Decision-Making
At Educating the Whole Engineer, we approach the development of these essential capacities through a rigorous, holistic framework: Character Education. We believe that by intentionally cultivating virtues, we prepare students to navigate the complexity of real-world ethical decision-making and serve the greater good.
Four Essential Virtues of the Whole Engineer
We utilize an established, research-based taxonomy (from the Jubilee Centre for Character and Virtues) to guide how we infuse essential qualities into our curriculum.
We focus on four prominent virtues necessary for success in engineering and society:
Critical Thinking
The capacity to analyze complex problems, evaluate evidence, and think rigorously about solutions.
Moral Empathy
The ability to understand the needs and perspectives of stakeholders and users, ensuring responsible, human-centered design.
Civic Service
A commitment to utilizing engineering knowledge for the betterment of society and the common good.
Performance Teamwork
The ability to collaborate effectively, communicate clearly, and contribute constructively to shared goals.
While these concepts are often taught as mere “skills” in other programs, we explicitly recast them as “virtues,” unlocking powerful added benefits for the learner.
The Power of Virtues vs. Skills
While skills are important, framing these capacities as virtues creates a deeper, more intentional educational experience. Our research identifies four critical distinctions that enrich your development:
Ordered to Good Ends: Unlike skills alone, virtues are intrinsically oriented toward morally good ends, ensuring your actions and designs are always aimed at societal benefit.
Built-in Motivation: Virtues possess a powerful motivational component that skills often lack, driving you to act with integrity and purpose even when the path is difficult.
Conflict Resolution: Virtues inherently involve the ability to evaluate and address potential conflicts among values—a necessary competency for real-world ethical dilemmas.
Mutually Reinforcing: Virtues are interconnected and mutually reinforcing. Developing empathy strengthens your teamwork, and critical thinking enhances your service—creating a holistic, powerful professional identity.
A Holistic Approach to Professional Readiness
By intentionally adopting a virtue framework, we draw on robust pedagogical literature in character education.
This allows us to guide you through a comprehensive, four-year curriculum designed to help you:
Consider Your Values: Actively reflect on your personal and professional values.
Navigate Complexity: Better address the ambiguities and ethical challenges of real-world engineering practice.
Serve the Greater Good: Develop the disposition needed to use your technical expertise for positive impact.
This is more than engineering education; it’s the development of the character needed to lead the future.
The challenges engineers face today—from climate change to global health—are complex. They require more than technical formulas; they demand multidisciplinary teamwork, awareness of social and political contexts, effective communication with diverse stakeholders, and a commitment to lifelong learning.
The Foundational Experience: “What is Engineering?”
Our unique approach starts on Day One in a required first-year engineering course focused on the human-centered design process. Within this course, a semester-long module called “What is Engineering?” serves as the intellectual cornerstone of your education.
This module is not a standalone history lesson—it’s a dynamic, interdisciplinary collaboration co-designed by faculty across engineering, history, and philosophy. It brings together four essential pillars of your development:
History & Global Contexts: We showcase the intersection of engineering and history to emphasize the global and societal contexts that shape professional practice.
Foundational Identity: We support the development of your engineer identity through historical contexts and the study of inspiring engineer exemplars.
Virtue of Courage: We explore the importance of courage as a foundational virtue required to take on complex, ethically challenging projects.
Integrated Knowledge: Engineering fundamentals, history, philosophy, and professional identity come to life through engaging lectures, interactive learning activities, and thought-provoking assignments.
Why Liberal Arts Knowledge is Engineering Knowledge
Our integration is not superficial—it’s foundational. Four out of the seven ABET Student Outcomes (the criteria every accredited engineering program must meet) are inherently connected to knowledge gained through the liberal arts, including:
Understanding the Impact of Engineering Solutions: Connecting technical work to global, economic, environmental, and societal contexts.
Ethical and Professional Responsibility: Applying informed judgment.
Effective Communication: Communicating effectively with a range of audiences.
Functioning on Teams: Collaborating effectively in a multidisciplinary environment.
By grounding your technical education in a rich understanding of human endeavor, society, and ethics, we ensure you graduate as a leader who can not only solve problems but also understand their human impact.
A Framework for Excellence
The “What is Engineering?” module serves as a scalable framework for integrating character virtues and humanities knowledge into engineering across the curriculum. It’s a testament to the belief that purposeful, multidisciplinary learning is the key to creating engineers ready for the complexities of the global workplace.
Are you ready to be an engineer who changes the world—and understands it?
The Liberal Arts Engineer: Integrating Purpose into Practice Engineering for a Complex World
Are you ready to integrate? Download the paper.
The Engineering Imperative: Complexity Demands More
Industry, society, and accreditation bodies all agree: the ethical landscape of professional engineering practice is more complex and nuanced than ever before. Our graduates must be prepared to handle not just rare disasters, but the myriad of ethical situations that arise daily.
At Educating the Whole Engineer, we recognize that traditional approaches to ethics education—often limited to rule-following and identifying a single “correct” answer in compliance-based cases—are simply not adequate for the complex, ambiguous realities of modern engineering .
Our Solution: Character Education
We are leaders in adopting and implementing a Character-Based (or Virtue-Based) Approach to engineering ethics. This method moves beyond legal codes and rules to foster the internal dispositions needed for ethical excellence.
Character education is a promising solution because it:
Embraces Ambiguity: Fosters greater comfort with the nuances and complexities of everyday ethical dilemmas.
Offers Personal Motivation: Provides actionable dimensions to ethical reasoning, linking decisions to personal values and professional identity.
Focuses on Flourishing: Emphasizes the virtues of character that promote the flourishing of individuals, communities, and society.
Research-Driven Pedagogy: Finding What Works
We recognize the challenges: faculty need support, and students can often be disengaged with traditional ethics lessons. That’s why our program is grounded in continuous research.
We explore critical questions to ensure our approach is both effective and accessible:
Which Virtues Grow?
Which character strengths (like resilience, humility, or courage) do our students perceive to have been strengthened across our curriculum?
What Classroom Experiences Drive Growth?
Which specific activities, pedagogies, and practices do students attribute to their perceived character growth?
The results of this research provide critical insight into how to design engaging ethics interventions that are viable for faculty and highly effective for students.
The Character Framework: Guiding Ethical Action
To ground our ethics education in sound philosophical principles, we use a robust framework—like the Jubilee Centre Framework—which categorizes virtues into four essential dimensions. These dimensions are not isolated; they build toward the ultimate ethical capacity: Practical Wisdom.
Practical Wisdom is the integrated virtue that allows you to discern and deliberate the right course of action when these other virtues inevitably collide—a skill essential for professional ethical decision-making.
We are cultivating the next generation of engineers who will not just follow the rules, but lead with integrity.
Unlike many fields that defer professional training to graduate school, engineering requires undergraduates to develop not only technical depth but also crucial professional acumen: ethics, effective communication, and team effectiveness.
While traditional engineering ethics often focuses on the two major theories—Deontology (rules and duty) and Consequentialism (outcomes)—we recognize these are not enough. They primarily emphasize compliance.
We adopt the third, most humanistic, and often neglected lens: Virtue Ethics.
A Humanistic Approach to Engineering Ethics
Virtue ethics, often associated with character development, shifts the focus from what rules to follow to what kind of engineer to be. It guides professional growth across essential areas:
Ethical Reasoning: Moving beyond one-right-answer scenarios to confidently navigate complex, everyday ethical dilemmas.
Team Effectiveness: Fostering the dispositions necessary for genuine collaboration and shared purpose.
Leadership and Communication: Cultivating the integrity and empathy needed to lead diverse teams and communicate responsibly.
Virtue ethics provides the lens to understand the dispositions that enable responsible thinking and acting.
Cultivating the Essential Virtues for Practice
To be a truly responsible engineer, one must be able to use good judgment to balance conflicting demands. Our curriculum is intentionally designed to cultivate the core virtues essential to the daily practice of engineering:
The highest expression of this development is Practical Wisdom—the virtue that facilitates discerning, deliberative action in situations where various demands and values collide. Virtuous engineers are responsible engineers.
Embedding Character for Leadership Development
We integrate this character-based approach across the curriculum, moving beyond theoretical discussions to focus on practical, everyday situations where these virtues can be applied.
This intentional focus on virtue ethics offers our students a powerful advantage, supporting not just technical competence but genuine character and leadership development—the foundation of professional growth.
The Virtuous Engineer: Professionalism Grounded in Character
Ready to Be a Responsible Leader? Download the paper.
At Educating the Whole Engineer, we don’t just teach the future of engineering; we are actively shaping the future of engineering education itself.
Over the past two decades, the field of Engineering Education Research (EER) has emerged as a vibrant, global, and highly impactful community. Our program is fundamentally built upon this scholarly foundation, ensuring that our curriculum and teaching practices are not based on tradition, but on contemporary research and the best evidence available worldwide.
A Curriculum Informed by Global Expertise
Our faculty are connected to a global network of over 100 expert contributors and researchers from more than 20 countries. This constant engagement with leading scholarship ensures our program immediately incorporates the most effective and innovative practices in the world.
Five Pillars of Our Research-Driven Approach
Our curriculum and teaching methods are directly informed by the critical research areas that are defining the next generation of engineering education:
Socio-Cognitive & Affective Learning: We utilize research on how students think, feel, and learn to maximize engagement and improve problem-solving skills.
Technology & Online Learning: We embrace evidence-based technological tools and pedagogical practices to create flexible, efficient, and modern learning environments.
Cultural & Ethical Issues: We lead the way in incorporating research on diversity, equity, and inclusion to foster a welcoming environment and prepare engineers for responsible, global practice.
Curriculum Design & Teaching Practices: Our entire curriculum is continually refined using research on effective teaching methods and teacher education at all levels, ensuring our faculty are equipped with the best tools.
Research Methods & Assessment: We use sophisticated assessment techniques, grounded in research, to measure not just technical knowledge, but also the growth of professional and ethical competencies.
Why a Research-Driven Program Matters
Choosing an engineering program grounded in Engineering Education Research means choosing a dynamic, future-proof education. This comprehensive approach ensures we are:
Improving Training: Providing the most effective education and training for the next generation of engineers.
Broadening Participation: Actively supporting growth in diversity and inclusion within the field.
Maximizing Impact: Ensuring your learning experience is backed by the latest understanding of human cognition, ethical development, and technology integration.
The Two Essential Domains of Real-World Practice:
The complexities of modern engineering require competence in two integrated domains. The closest students come to replicating this in-career experience is the Capstone Design Project, which must intentionally address both:
Technical Domains (Knowing How)
Non-Technical Domains (Knowing Why & How to Lead)Technical Engineering Knowledge & Principles
Our Pedagogical Foundation: Cognitive Apprenticeship
To intentionally prepare our students for these complex demands, we ground our Capstone design experience in a highly appropriate cognitive learning model: Cognitive Apprenticeship.
This model provides a meaningful framework for our faculty to develop and reflect on pedagogical features that effectively transition students from the classroom to the professional world.
The Six Phases of Learning in Capstone Design
Cognitive Apprenticeship structures the learning process into six powerful phases, ensuring development across both technical and non-technical domains. While most programs naturally excel at some phases (like Scaffolding and Articulation), we intentionally focus on all six for maximum impact:
Modeling: Faculty explicitly demonstrate complex problem-solving, ethical, and design processes.
Coaching: Providing iterative feedback and support as students attempt tasks.
Scaffolding: Structuring the project to provide increasing levels of difficulty as students gain competence.
Articulation: Requiring students to verbalize and justify their thinking and design choices.
Reflection: Guiding students to compare their performance with expert standards and their peers. (A key area for building ethical reflection.)
Exploration: Encouraging students to tackle new problems and generalize their learned skills to new contexts.
Intentional Development: Character and Entrepreneurship
We discovered that while our capstone process naturally cultivates core engineering design competencies and team effectiveness, achieving proficiency in certain crucial non-technical areas requires dedicated focus—particularly through improving Modeling, Coaching, Reflection, and Exploration:
Entrepreneurial Mindset: We are building intentional features into the capstone to foster innovation, risk assessment, and market readiness.
Character Development: We deliberately structure opportunities for ethical reflection and decision-making, ensuring students graduate not just as skilled engineers, but as principled professionals.
Capstone Reimagined: The Cognitive Apprenticeship for the Whole Engineer
Ready to Innovate? Download the paper.
Beyond Clarity: The Character of Communication
Effective communication is undeniably fundamental to engineering practice. But at Wake Forest Engineering, we see it as something more profound: a powerful vehicle for cultivating character, promoting ethical development, and defining professional conduct.
We have transformed communication skills from a simple competency into an integrative learning experience—a core component of our mission to Educate the Whole Engineer.
The Hidden Links: Communication and Virtue
Through analysis of specialized communication seminars led by experts in engineering leadership, we discovered direct, powerful connections between mastering communication and strengthening professional character.
Every act of effective communication requires and reinforces key virtues essential to ethical practice:
Empathy
Understanding the stakeholder’s perspective before responding.
Honesty & Integrity
Communicating data, findings, and risks accurately and truthfully.
Humility
Actively listening, admitting knowledge gaps, and seeking input.
Courage
Speaking up to address ethical concerns or challenging team assumptions.
Self-Awareness
Understanding how your communication style impacts team effectiveness and perception.
Authentic Integration: Closing the Ethics Gap
Traditional education often silos ethics and communication, treating them as separate subjects. We believe this is a missed opportunity. Our approach authentically integrates these two topics, transforming how we teach professional skills.
By leveraging a practical professional skill like communication, we provide concrete, daily opportunities for students to engage in ethical growth (grounded in virtue ethics).Topics Explored Through the Lens of Character:
Our curriculum intentionally highlights communication topics from the perspective of ethics and character cultivation, including:
Stakeholder Engagement: How to communicate complex risks and benefits with empathy and transparency.
Team Conflict Resolution: Using courage and honesty to navigate difficult conversations constructively.
Documentation and Reporting: Ensuring integrity and accuracy in all professional written communication.
Leadership Presence: Projecting self-awareness and humility in technical presentations.
The Whole Engineer Advantage
Our preliminary findings, confirmed by compelling student feedback, underscore the vital role this integrative learning plays in student development.
When you learn to communicate effectively, you are simultaneously learning to think and act responsibly—preparing you to be an ethical leader who uses your voice to serve the greater good.
The Responsibility to Innovate: Ethics at the Core
Engineers hold a critical ethical responsibility: to better humanity through technological and scientific innovation. This is why engineering ethics is a required component of professional licensure and every accredited engineering program.
We go beyond fulfilling minimum requirements. We are actively engaged in researching and refining how engineering ethics is taught, ensuring our graduates are prepared for the full complexity of professional life.
Leading the Field: A Critical Review of Ethics Education
Our faculty conducted the first systematic, comparative review of the twenty-six most widely used engineering ethics textbooks. This extensive analysis uncovered over forty thematic topics—and revealed critical gaps—that inform the sophisticated design of our curriculum.
Topics That Define Conventional Ethics (Covered by Majority of Textbooks):
Public Welfare and Wellbeing
Whistleblowing
Safety and Risk
Professionalism
Ethics in Design and Technological Development
Conflict of Interest
Environmental Ethics
Filling the Gaps: Our Comprehensive Advantage
Our research provides a clear roadmap to evolve the field of engineering ethics. While many programs rely solely on the common topics above, our curriculum is intentionally designed to address the vital, often-neglected areas that prepare you for daily ethical challenges.
The Benefit of a Comprehensive Curriculum
Deepened Knowledge: You learn not just what happened in a famous case, but why it happened, through the lens of various moral theories (a topic covered in only a few textbooks).Holistic Preparation: We prepare you for the day-to-day realities of the workplace, focusing on areas like intellectual property, employer/employee relationships, and the ethical duty of competence.
Future-Ready: By addressing ethics in research and education/academia (topics often omitted), we prepare you for careers in research, graduate studies, and leadership.
Be the Engineer Who Sets the Standard
Our commitment to leading engineering education research means you receive an ethics education that is unparalleled in its depth and comprehensiveness. We provide the insights and tools to transcend the textbook, equipping you to make responsible decisions for the betterment of humanity.
Engineering Ethics Re-Defined: Beyond the Standard Textbook
Ready to Engage with Advanced Ethics? Download the paper.
What essential human virtues lie behind the rules?
We conduct original research to analyze and refine the foundational ethical documents of the profession (such as the codes from NSPE, IEEE, and SHPE). Our goal is to move beyond mere compliance and identify the core virtues that truly define responsible engineering practice. This work ensures our curriculum is leading, not following, in ethical education.
Six Foundational Virtues of Engineering
Our preliminary investigation, conducted by an interdisciplinary team of engineers and a philosopher, revealed six virtues that are undeniably fundamental to all professional engineering codes:
Responsibility
Integrity
Honesty
Trustworthiness
Teamwork
Fairness
The Missing Virtues: Where We Lead the Conversation
While these six are critical, our analysis identified a significant opportunity for the profession—and our curriculum—to evolve. We believe there are crucial missing virtues that must be made more visible in the practice and education of future engineers:
Bravery (Moral Courage): The willingness to speak up against unethical practices.
Leadership: Guiding teams and projects with foresight and integrity.
Curiosity & Love of Learning: The drive for lifelong technical competence and self-improvement.
Creativity: Innovating ethical solutions to complex problems.
Perseverance: The tenacity to see responsible projects through to completion.
Virtue Ethics: A Richer Perspective
Why introduce virtues? A Virtue Ethics lens offers a far richer, more humanistic, and actionable perspective on the ethical dilemmas engineers face every day.
Compliance Asks, “What rule did I break?“
Virtue Ethics Asks, “What kind of engineer should I be?“
By grounding your education in virtue ethics, we empower you to develop the dispositions to act, think, and feel responsibly, preparing you to use your judgment to balance conflicting demands and lead with integrity.
Join a program that is actively shaping the ethical future of the engineering profession.
Beyond the Code: Defining the Virtuous Engineer Ethics Elevated: The Heart of Professional Practice Every practicing engineer is bound by a professional code of ethics.
Ready to Lead with Virtue? Download the paper.
Cultivating the Next Generation of Ethical Engineers
It’s one thing to teach ethics; it’s another to measure and prove that students are developing the sophisticated judgment required for professional practice. At Wake Forest Engineering, we are committed to Cultivating Character in Engineering (CCE), and that commitment requires world-class assessment tools.
Our research team is pioneering the use of Situational Judgment Tests (SJTs)—a highly effective, evidence-based assessment method—to measure the development of nuanced, character-based ethical decision-making in our students.
What is a Situational Judgment Test (SJT)?
SJTs are not typical multiple-choice exams. They are designed to mirror the complex, ambiguous realities of the workplace.
Real-World Scenarios: SJTs present you with complex, real-world scenarios derived directly from engineering professional experiences that do not have simple right or wrong answers.
Action-Oriented Prompts: You must choose the best and worst course of action from four distinct responses, forcing you to engage in sophisticated ethical analysis.
Predictive Power: Established in medical and business education, empirical studies show that SJT scores are more predictive of future behavior and professional actions than traditional standardized tests.
Pioneering the CCE-SJT
We are among the first in engineering education to develop and test an SJT specifically targeted at assessing character-based ethical decision-making.
Our preliminary development process involved testing the nuanced ethical judgment of three distinct groups:
First-Year Engineering Students
Early Career Engineering Professionals
Expert Engineering Professionals
Findings That Define Our Advantage
Our research findings are clear: SJTs successfully differentiate the ethical judgment of students, early career professionals, and experts. This demonstrates that SJTs can be used to effectively assess the trajectory of student learning in complex ethical decision-making.
Your Journey to Professional Judgment
By utilizing the CCE-SJT and other rigorous assessment tools, we ensure that our character education interventions are working. We are providing you with the complex scenarios, feedback, and developmental opportunities needed to build the core competencies—like humility, courage, and integrity—that underpin ethical leadership in the engineering field.
Choose a program that doesn’t just promise character development, but actively assesses and proves it.
Measuring Integrity: Assessing Character with Situational Judgment Tests (SJTs)
Ready to Have Your Judgment Challenged? Download the paper.
Beyond Technical: The Modern Competencies Required
National reports from organizations like the National Academy of Engineering and industry leaders have unanimously called for reform: the modern engineer needs an expanded set of competencies that reach far beyond pure technical expertise.
Core Competencies of the Whole Engineer
Our strategic curriculum intentionally cultivates these vital skills alongside technical mastery:
Character Development (e.g., Integrity, Humility, Compassion)
Leadership
Entrepreneurial Mindset
Social Consciousness
Professional Formation
Blueprint for Transformation: Strategy and Structure
We approached curriculum design as an engineering problem, guided by proven change models to ensure successful integration:
Strategic Alignment: We meticulously mapped these expanded competencies (such as integrity and compassion) to meet and exceed the required ABET Student Outcomes 1-7, ensuring that professional and character formation is embedded throughout your entire four-year engineering experience.
Pedagogical Innovation: We utilize advanced teaching strategies, including experiential learning integration and team teaching, ensuring technical rigor is seamlessly integrated with the development of virtues and leadership skills.
Collaborative Design: Success was driven by diverse stakeholder involvement and collaborative sharing of instructional materials across faculty.
Proven Success: Outcomes That Set Us Apart
This intentional, strategic approach to educating the Whole Engineer has yielded significant, measurable results—proof that our model works:
Innovation
Our model is seen as a leader in engineering education reform.
Cultivating Character
Incorporating virtues and values into engineering. Download the paper now.
Beyond the Grade: Understanding True Ethical Development
We recognize that preparing ethical engineers requires more than just assigning a few chapters on professional codes. It demands a systematic understanding of how our learning environment impacts student growth in three critical dimensions: Knowledge, Skills, and Attitudes (KSA) related to ethics and character.
As leaders in engineering education research, we are tackling the toughest question in the field: How do we meaningfully measure ethical and character development?
The Assessment Challenge: Defining Growth
Assessing character-related KSAs is challenging. The field often grapples with conceptual clarity and operationalizing concrete measures. We are pioneering solutions to overcome these hurdles:
Conceptualization and Operationalization: We are defining precisely what “character” and “ethical attitudes” look like in an engineering context and developing concrete measures to assess them.
Meaningful Feedback: Our goal is to refine assessment practices that provide meaningful feedback on developmental character dimensions—feedback that is not punitive, but helps students improve their moral, intellectual, and performance capabilities.
Our work is driven by the belief that by refining assessment, we can define and deploy pedagogical methods that develop our students holistically and more effectively.
Evidence-Based Assessment in Action
To understand how character and attitudes are represented and assessed in the engineering curriculum, our faculty are engaged in rigorous research, drawing from global literature and our own innovative work.
We analyze cases where various aspects of ethical and character development have been successfully implemented and tested. This evidence-based approach allows us to:
Identify Effective Processes: Gain insights into what processes and experiences within a learning environment make a positive difference in ethical development.
Refine Pedagogy: Use data to better teach ethics and holistically prepare our students for the complex, nuanced ethical decision-making they will face in their professional careers.
Our work is helping to overcome the traditional shortcomings in ethics education by focusing on the attitudinal shifts and character strengths that underpin responsible engineering practice.
The Path Forward: Future Directions in Ethics Education
This commitment to assessment and research ensures that the Wake Forest Engineering curriculum is dynamic, effective, and always aligned with the highest standards of professional conduct. We are dedicated to filling existing gaps in ethics education and posing recommendations for the future of the field.
Beyond Clarity: The Character of Communication
Effective communication is undeniably fundamental to engineering practice. But at Wake Forest Engineering, we see it as something more profound: a powerful vehicle for cultivating character, promoting ethical development, and defining professional conduct.
We have transformed communication skills from a simple competency into an integrative learning experience—a core component of our mission to Educate the Whole Engineer.
The Hidden Links: Communication and Virtue
Through analysis of specialized communication seminars led by experts in engineering leadership (a former engineer and leadership coach), we discovered direct, powerful connections between mastering communication and strengthening professional character.
Every act of effective communication requires and reinforces key virtues essential to ethical practice:
Virtue Cultivated
Role in Professional Communication
Empathy
Understanding the stakeholder’s perspective before responding.
Honesty & Integrity
Communicating data, findings, and risks accurately and truthfully.
Humility
Actively listening, admitting knowledge gaps, and seeking input.
Courage
Speaking up to address ethical concerns or challenging team assumptions.
Self-Awareness
Understanding how your communication style impacts team effectiveness and perception.
Authentic Integration: Closing the Ethics Gap
Traditional education often silos ethics and communication, treating them as separate subjects. We believe this is a missed opportunity. Our approach authentically integrates these two topics, transforming how we teach professional skills.
By leveraging a practical professional skill like communication, we provide concrete, daily opportunities for students to engage in ethical growth (grounded in virtue ethics).
Topics Explored Through the Lens of Character:
Our curriculum intentionally highlights communication topics from the perspective of ethics and character cultivation, including:
Stakeholder Engagement: How to communicate complex risks and benefits with empathy and transparency.
Team Conflict Resolution: Using courage and honesty to navigate difficult conversations constructively.
Documentation and Reporting: Ensuring integrity and accuracy in all professional written communication.
Leadership Presence: Projecting self-awareness and humility in technical presentations.
The Whole Engineer Advantage
Our preliminary findings, confirmed by compelling student feedback, underscore the vital role this integrative learning plays in student development.
When you learn to communicate effectively, you are simultaneously learning to think and act responsibly—preparing you to be an ethical leader who uses your voice to serve the greater good.
We are committed to continuous improvement in teaching and learning. That means critically assessing not only what our students know, but how accurately they perceive their own knowledge and growth—a vital component of professional maturity.
Our faculty are pioneering innovative assessment methods by combining traditional student feedback tools with validated psychological scales to gain deeper insights. We are using a 3rd-year Control Systems and Instrumentation course as a living laboratory to address critical questions about student learning and self-perception.
The Research: Knowledge Surveys Meet Intellectual Humility
We are leveraging Knowledge Surveys—where students self-report their mastery—and comparing them against two external benchmarks:Instructor Expectations: What faculty anticipate students should know pre-course and the targets they should reach post-course.
Intellectual Humility: Using a validated scale to measure students’ Intellectual Humility (the ability to accurately recognize the limits of one’s own knowledge).
Key Preliminary Findings: The Perception Gap
Our initial findings revealed a powerful insight into student perception, which directly informs our teaching strategy:
Students consistently over-assess their own knowledge compared to instructor expectations and targets, particularly at the end of the course.
This “perception gap” is not a failing; it’s a critical learning opportunity. It indicates that after a concentrated course experience, students may overestimate their mastery in certain areas.
Turning Research into Pedagogical Action
This data is crucial for continuous improvement. By understanding where these gaps in perception exist, our instructors can:
Manage Perceptions: Provide students with broader context in targeted knowledge areas, helping them calibrate their self-assessment and recognize the complexity of the subject.
Encourage Deeper Learning: Guide students to the appropriate next steps in their lifelong learning journey.
The Virtue of Intellectual Humility
While the direct link between self-assessment and intellectual humility is an ongoing area of research, we strongly believe in the importance of cultivating this virtue.
Why?
Fuels Lifelong Learning: Intellectual humility is associated with a mastery approach to learning—a fundamental mindset for innovation.
Employer Value: It is a highly valued characteristic in engineers, driving curiosity, better collaboration, and responsible professional conduct.
We are dedicated to helping you see your strengths clearly and understand your growth opportunities accurately—the foundation of true professional competence.
The Humility Gap: Researching Smarter Ways to Learn Beyond the Grade: Assessing What Students Think They Know
Ready to Learn and Grow? Download the paper.