| NSF Org: |
SES Division of Social and Economic Sciences |
| Recipient: |
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| Initial Amendment Date: | March 8, 2019 |
| Latest Amendment Date: | March 8, 2019 |
| Award Number: | 1835276 |
| Award Instrument: | Standard Grant |
| Program Manager: |
John Parker
SES Division of Social and Economic Sciences SBE Directorate for Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences |
| Start Date: | March 15, 2019 |
| End Date: | August 31, 2020 (Estimated) |
| Total Intended Award Amount: | $49,656.00 |
| Total Awarded Amount to Date: | $49,656.00 |
| Funds Obligated to Date: |
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| History of Investigator: |
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| Recipient Sponsored Research Office: |
323 DR MARTIN LUTHER KING JR BLVD NEWARK NJ US 07102-1824 (973)596-5275 |
| Sponsor Congressional District: |
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| Primary Place of Performance: |
NJ US 07102-1982 |
| Primary Place of
Performance Congressional District: |
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| Unique Entity Identifier (UEI): |
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| Parent UEI: |
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| NSF Program(s): | Cultivating Cultures of Ethica |
| Primary Program Source: |
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| Program Reference Code(s): |
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| Program Element Code(s): |
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| Award Agency Code: | 4900 |
| Fund Agency Code: | 4900 |
| Assistance Listing Number(s): | 47.075 |
ABSTRACT
For nearly a decade the National Science Foundation has required training in ethics and responsible conduct of research for postdocs, graduate students, and undergraduates who receive NSF funding, but much remains to be learned about the kinds of approaches to ethics education that are the most effective. Workshop participants will formulate a set of research questions for advancing the assessment of ethics training initiatives and then meet to answer these questions and advance collective understanding and practice related to ethics training assessments. Workshop results will contribute to developing a more robust evidence base for improving ethical sensitivity, clarifying ethical decision making, and fostering cultures of research integrity.
This workshop will improve knowledge of factors affecting ethical decision making in research and of how to systematically assess the efficacy of research ethics training initiatives. Grant activities will be organized around developing answers to several research questions. These include: (1) What goals should ethics education interventions aim to achieve? (2) Which skills are essential to ethical decision making? 3) How can ethics education interventions contribute to a culture of integrity at the level of the individual, small group, and institution? (4) How can we best assess the efficacy and efficiency of different types of ethics education interventions? Workshop participants will collaborate to answer these questions and increase our ability to build and fairly assess next generation interventions for promoting research ethics. Results will be disseminated via conference proceedings and publications, while tools and assessment rubrics will be shared through The Online Ethics Center.
This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
PROJECT OUTCOMES REPORT
Disclaimer
This Project Outcomes Report for the General Public is displayed verbatim as submitted by the Principal Investigator (PI) for this award. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this Report are those of the PI and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation; NSF has not approved or endorsed its content.
In August 2019, researchers from across the broad field of ethics education met in Washington, DC to discuss the assessment of various means of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) ethics education, including those that go beyond traditional classes. This is an important question not only for the field of ethics education, but also for STEM and for society. Since their work is so important to society, we all want scientists and engineers to adhere to the highest ethical standards. Because we agree that good scientists and engineers ought to act ethically, society requires scientists and engineers to receive ethics education. We also obviously want that education to be effective. Ultimately, this workshop tried to answer the question of how we can best assess the efficacy and efficiency of different approaches to ethics education.
Workshop conversations clustered under four headings, each spearheaded by one of the project Principal Investigators:
1. Goals of Ethics Education: Adam Briggle suggested that we have two sets of problems to deal with when it comes to assessing ethics education. We have hard problems (we don't always know whether our efforts are having the intended effect) and really hard problems (we are not sure what the intended effect should be). Until we understand the goals of providing ethics education to scientists and engineers, we have little hope of assessing whether we are achieving those goals.
2. Knowing and Acting Ethically: Britt Holbrook raised another 'really hard' question for ethics education, one that takes us beyond the idea that acting ethically means simply following the rules. Sometimes we know, or think we know, what the right thing to do is. Often, however, scientists and engineers will face decisions about what they ought to do without knowing what the right thing to do is. To make things really hard, suppose both that there always is a right thing to do, but that we can never know for sure whether someone is really doing the right thing. Under such circumstances, how can we either teach ethics or assess our attempts to do so?
3. Ethical Sensitivity, Behavior, and Skills: Michael Hoffmann constructed a preliminary typology of the sorts of 'ethical things' that can, have, and should be measured: ethical sensitivity, moral reasoning, ethical behavior, ethical decision-making, and ethical skills.
4. Ethics Education on Multiple Scales: Michael O'Rourke suggested three open questions for our participants. 1) How much pluralism should we allow in ethics education (how many different approaches are acceptable)? 2) How could we link ethics training to scientific training (making training to be a good scientist overlap with training to be ethically good)? 3) How should we define an ethical 'culture'?
Our two-day discussion raised three larger points concerning the assessment of ethics education:
- A tension exists between developing effective ethics education interventions and determining the effectiveness of ethics education interventions.
- Although no one wants to reinvent the wheel, novel interventions may require new, rather than already well-established, approaches to assessment.
- Rather than designing ethics education interventions around existing assessment tools, we should involve assessment experts in the design of novel interventions in order to inform the design of the assessment tools.
Far from concluding that we have everything already figured out, the workshop suggests that scholars and practitioners in the field of ethics education still have much more to discuss.
Last Modified: 12/01/2020
Modified by: James B Holbrook
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