Collaborative Research: Practical Ethical Instruction with Expert-Analyzed Cases

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This project undertakes a systematic study of cognitive processes that support students in learning important concepts and skills concerning practical ethical reasoning in a professional domain. The investigators will build a corpus of cases, strategies, and analyses from three general sources: (1) the case examples and exercises taken from leading textbooks in engineering ethics (2) the knowledge, reasoning skills and case examples provided by engineering ethicists and professional engineers as revealed in protocols which the investigators will acquire and analyze, and (3) the findings of the investigators' previous empirical study of different strategies for analyzing practical ethical dilemmas employed by novice and more experienced ethical reasoners. As a result of that study, the investigators found that experienced ethical reasoners are careful to identify issues and to specify conditions under which specific professional role obligations recommend particular actions, that they elaborate conditions which would affect the moral analysis of a problem, in part through posing hypothetical variations of the problem, and that they justify resolutions in terms of those conditions which they conclude apply in the problem. The investigators will develop techniques for using the corpus to challenge and instruct novices in a manual tutoring intervention and assess the pedagogical value of those techniques. They will present an experimental group of novices aspects of the experienced analyses and invite them to compare those conclusions with their own reasoning. The goal will be to assess how novices understand the use of hypothetical variations and their moral significance for the analysis of the problem. A control group will not be exposed to the experts' reasoning and conclusions, and their conclusions will be compared with the experimental analysis of the same problems. The experimental design will also allow investigators to contrast the protocols of novices analyzing problems from the corpus and compare them to the experienced or expert analyses of the same problems. Results will be reported in journals and at meetings and can form the basis for developing a computational model and designing an interactive tutoring system. The significance lies in the development of a better understanding of a pedagogical strategy widely used in practical ethical instruction. The study will shed light on how experts' analyses comparing problems to variations can assist students in learning the process of ethical reasoning.