Ethics in Science and Engineering National Clearinghouse

Michael Bowler, PI; Susan Amato-Henderson, Co-PI; Joseph Holles Co-PI; Jingfang Ren Co-PI; Ted Lockhart, Co-PI, Michigan Technological University.

The goal of this research is to contribute to our knowledge of the relationship of values (i.e., moral motivation and moral commitment) to ethical sensitivity and ultimately to moral functioning, an area of the theory of moral pedagogy on which little research has been done, especially within ethics education in science and engineering. To these ends, the PI will first inventory the personal and professional values of a diverse group of graduate students. He will then assess the impact of such values on ethical sensitivity to issues of responsible conduct of research (RCR), using a tool created as part of this study to measure ethical sensitivity. The research will examine role concept and moral motivation as predictors of ethical sensitivity within a sample of multi-national science and engineering graduate students. The PI will seek correlations between these students' personal and professional values, and their ability to discern multifaceted aspects of situations involving issues in RCR such as intellectual property, plagiarism, etc. Using value surveys, the PI will gauge students' moral motivation for, commitment to, and emotional engagement with issues involving RCR. Ultimately, he hopes to discover which value-sets, both personal and professional, are indicative of greater or lesser levels of ethical sensitivity to RCR.

Broader Impacts: This research addresses one of the major challenges facing graduate student ethics education. This is because, relative to undergraduates, the graduate science and engineering student population represents a far more diverse cultural and national demographic, and brings with it a greater diversity of personal and professional values. Project outcomes will help other educators and researchers, by providing them with the information they need to modify their own teaching methods appropriately and to spur research into creative and innovative approaches to educating graduate science and engineering students in ethics. This will be accomplished through presentations, journal publications, and dissemination through Michigan Tech?s Center for Educational Technology, Research, and Assessment (CETRA). The impact of this work will extend not just to universities but also to society at large, since today's students will be tomorrow's faculty members and researchers in private industry.