Project introduction and background information
In the project Virtuous reasoning with AI, our team, consisting of Vlasta Sikimić (PI), Yara Daamen, Karolina Doulougeri and Krist Vaesen, is launching an educational intervention designed to shape the next generation of virtuously minded engineers. At a time when AI systems influence decisions at every level of society, education faces a defining challenge: teaching students not just to use AI, but to question it. In the new course, Critical thinking in the age of AI, students will engage with intellectual justice to confront algorithmic bias and intellectual honesty to tackle transparency and accountability in AI systems. Through carefully designed learning activities, the project cultivates higher-order thinking about responsible AI use, empowering students to critically examine, ethically design, and challenge intelligent technologies. Our initiative directly supports TU/e’s values by educating engineers who build new systems wisely.
Objective and expected outcomes
The Importance of Teaching Intellectual Virtues
With the increasing use of advanced AI technologies, engineers face new ethical and intellectual challenges. A key problem is that users often fail to recognize biased and unfair AI outputs. By explicitly teaching intellectual virtues such as humility, honesty, curiosity, and justice, we help students critically evaluate AI and make inclusive, well-reasoned decisions. This is currently the only TU/e course dedicated to this goal.
Building on Previous Work
Building on a pilot study that utilized an educational intervention, which showed that introducing these virtues raises student awareness of ethical AI issues, this project addresses remaining gaps. Higher-order skills such as creating solutions were rarely observed, and students sometimes confused intellectual virtues with broader ethical ones. We address this through better scaffolding, redesigned learning activities, and recorded lectures. Additionally, the pilot lacked a validated instrument to measure intellectual justice, which we are now developing and validating for use in this course.
Learning Objectives
The course targets three goals: students will develop knowledge and awareness of intellectual virtues in relation to AI (LO1); apply and connect those virtues to real-life scenarios to foster creative problem-solving (LO2); and reflect on their own intellectual virtues in the context of their professional development as engineers (LO3).
Results and learnings
The intellectual justice scale has been developed and validated on a large sample, which we aim to publish. The scale will be used to measure students' intellectual justice before and after the intervention. The preregistration for this study is available on OSF, and further details on the scale development can be found in the accompanying document. The educational design and online materials are currently under development.
Additional results will be reported after the course has been taught.
Recommendations
We have a longer-term ambition to carry the educational intervention further and extend it both in length and in scope. The larger goal is to have a comprehensive training on AI literacy, and the scientific evidence that this course indeed deepens the understanding of ethical and epistemic challenges related to AI use. We firmly believe this to be a key skill-set that students nowadays need to develop.
Practical outcomes
All educational material developed will be re-used in next iterations of the course. This includes the recorded materials. We aim to publish the results of the study in a scientific outlet.