Collaborative Research: Practical Ethical Instruction with Expert-Analyzed Cases

该项目对认知过程进行了系统的研究，以支持学生学习专业领域中有关实践道德推理的重要概念和技能。调查人员将从三个一般来源建立一个案例，策略和分析的语料库：(1)主要工程伦理学教科书中的案例和练习；(2)研究人员将获取和分析的协议中揭示的工程伦理学家和专业工程师提供的知识、推理技巧和案例；(3)研究人员之前对新手和更有经验的伦理推理者使用的不同分析实际伦理困境策略的实证研究结果。这项研究的结果是，研究者发现，经验丰富的道德推理者会谨慎地识别问题，并明确在哪些条件下，特定的职业角色义务会建议采取特定的行动，他们会详细说明影响对问题的道德分析的条件，部分是通过提出问题的假设变化，他们会根据他们得出的适用于问题的条件来证明解决方案的合理性。研究人员将开发使用语料库的技术来挑战和指导新手进行手工辅导干预，并评估这些技术的教学价值。他们将向一组新手展示有经验的分析的各个方面，并邀请他们将这些结论与自己的推理进行比较。目的是评估新手如何理解假设变量的使用及其对问题分析的道德意义。控制组不会接触到专家的推理和结论，他们的结论将与对相同问题的实验分析进行比较。实验设计还将允许研究人员对比分析语料库问题的新手的协议，并将其与经验丰富或专家对相同问题的分析进行比较。研究结果将在期刊和会议上发表，并可作为开发计算模型和设计互动式辅导系统的基础。其意义在于更好地理解在实际伦理教学中广泛使用的教学策略。这项研究将阐明专家对问题和变化进行比较的分析如何帮助学生学习道德推理的过程。

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.