Virtual reality-assisted neuromuscular training effects on agility performance and injury prevention in basketball athletes: a controlled laboratory experiment.

Engineers contribute to the creation of physical environments and mediating tools that shape billions of human and non-human lives around the world. Simultaneously, they are themselves ‘also particularly situated actors, whose educational opportunities and work settings place constraints on what they learn, know, and do’ (Smith, , p. 13). These circumstances create a compelling need to equip engineering students for complex ethical thinking in their future profession, preparing them to grasp how political, economic, and institutional meta-structures influence the ethical behaviors of engineers, individually and collectively – and vice versa (Byrne et al., ; Conlon, ; Monteiro & Sousa, ; Nguyen et al., ; Tormey et al., ). In Sweden it is nationally regulated that engineering students should learn to make ethical judgements and ‘show insight into the role of technology … in society and individuals’ responsibility for how it is used, including social and economic aspects as well as environmental and work environment aspects’ (Higher Education Ordinance, , p. 100, Annex 2), and similar criteria are maintained by several international accreditation boards (Hitt et al., ). However, making this connection between microethical perspectives (focusing on individual actors) and macroethical perspectives (embracing the societal level) has turned out to be a challenge for engineering students, and some of the most common pedagogical strategies in engineering ethics education (EEE) fall short in supporting students in this regard (Herkert, ; McAninch, ; Schiff et al., ). A range of teaching strategies have been implemented in EEE to address perceived pedagogical needs, including e.g., case studies, group or class discussions, reviewing codes and rules, developing heuristics for ethical decision-making, team projects, service learning, communication with professional engineers, individual written assignments, literature study, games, and role play (Chance et al., ; Hess & Fore, ; Shen & Li, ). Like some of these, fiction-based pedagogy has been promoted as a promising approach to decrease the gap between microethical versus macroethical perspectives in students’ learning (Berne & Schummer, ; Burton et al., , ; Hitt & Lennerfors, ; Hansen, , ; Manià et al., ). However, empirical research on this matter in EEE is still scarce.