SUMMARY

There is widespread agreement that scientists and engineers should receive training in ethics. But there is no consensus on how best to incorporate ethics into science and engineering education. Most importantly, little is known about how to achieve and how to assess the desired outcome of helping scientists and engineers to make good ethical decisions. This project addresses a major gap in ethics education: connecting ethics education to ethical decision making.

This research and education project develops an alternative, gaming approach to the ethics education of scientists and engineers. It seeks to recast the ethics education of scientists and engineers as less a matter of memorizing rules through content delivery systems and more a matter of practicing virtuous behavior in life-like gaming environments.

Our approach builds from the growing literature on pedagogical uses of games and our own prototype research ethics games (Award # 1252692, EAGER: Prototyping a Virtue Ethics Game). Rather than instructing students in 'the right thing to do', then testing whether they know 'the right thing to do', games immerse students in situations in which they must decide what to do. The gaming environment serves as a training ground for developing practical ethical skills and forming habits of character. Games are more true to the ambiguous, dynamic, and complex situations faced by scientists and engineers than any pre-packaged, static, and unidirectional content.

In this project, we propose to test the hypothesis that an ethics game can improve ethical decision making. This will entail 1) finalizing three prototype research ethics games; 2) facilitating game play with diverse graduate student populations from multiple institutions; 3) improving the games through an iterative process; 4) assessing game playability and impacts on ethical decision making using a well-validated evaluation tool (the DIT-2); and 5) disseminating the games and final research results.

Intellectual Merit:

This project advances knowledge of the least understood area of ethics education: how to assess the connection between ethics education and ethical decision making. By using virtue ethics theory and taking an interactive gaming approach, this project has the potential to transform ethics education for a new generation of scientists and engineers. Assessments will address not only user participation in and satisfaction with the games developed, but also their improvement in developing the skills needed for ethical decision making in real-world contexts. The team incorporates expertise from the Center for the Study of Interdisciplinarity (CSID), the Center for Learning Enhancement, Assessment, and Redesign (CLEAR), the Department of Philosophy and Religion Studies, the Department of Chemistry, the College of Engineering, and the Toulouse Graduate School at the University of North Texas (UNT).

Broader Impacts:

This project contributes to a specific, desired societal outcome: the improvement of ethical decision making in scientists and engineers. The America COMPETES Act requires that students who receive funding from NSF receive instruction in Responsible Conduct of Research (RCR), and the National Academies have recommended that acquiring the skills necessary for ethical decision making is the most important aspect of RCR instruction. This project will develop games that will be made available to the partner institutions: Texas Woman's University, Texas State University, and Northern Illinois University. The game will also be adapted for inclusion in UNT's RCR training program for graduate students. Currently, UNT'S RCR training consists of online CITI modules, a series of workshops, and a few dedicated courses. The games will also strengthen UNT offerings, make RCR training more accessible to more students, and lay the foundation for a proposed certificate in RCR. Project results will be disseminated broadly, including contributions to the Ethics CORE (Collaborative Online Resource Environment) Digital Library and Ethics, Science, and Technology: An International Resource, the second edition of the widely acclaimed Encyclopedia of Science, Technology, and Ethics.