Rather than instructing students in "the right thing to do", and then testing whether they know "the right thing to do", games immerse students in situations in which they must decide what to do. This is the foundation on which a major National Science Foundation grant in the amount of

$300,000 has been awarded to Dr. Joseph Oppong, Professor of Geography and Associate Dean for Research and Professional Development, and colleagues at UNT. The 3-year grant is a collaborative effort between the Toulouse Graduate School, Chemistry Department (Angela Wilson), College of Engineering (Kuruvilla John), the Center for the Study of Interdisciplinarity (CSID) (Britt Holbrook and Adam Briggle), and CLEAR (Patrick Pluscht and his team)

The research thesis is simple: while ethics training for researchers is a recognized need and both NSF and NIH mandate ethics training for students participating in funded projects, current research doesn't show a clear relationship between training and actual ethical behavior.

Oppong and his team plan to test the idea that a virtual game environment will serve as an effective training ground for developing the practical skills necessary for sound ethical decision making in the conduct of research. Games mimic more accurately the ambiguous, dynamic, and complex situations that scientists and engineers face than any pre-packaged, static, and unidirectional content-delivery module.

In addition to building on virtue ethics theory, the NSF research will contribute directly to Responsible Conduct of Research (RCR) training at UNT and partner institutions, including Texas Woman's University, Texas State University, and Northern Illinois University. Games developed as part of the research will make RCR training more accessible to more students and lay the foundation for a proposed certificate in RCR.

For more Dr. Oppong's research http://geography.unt.edu/people/faculty.