EESE: University of Kansas Initiative on Ethics Education in Science and Engineering (KUI-EESE)

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This award is made under Ethics Education in Science and Engineering (NSF 06-524). Intellectual Merit: Ethical conduct is the hallmark of excellence in engineering and scientific research, design, and practice. While graduate programs in these areas routinely emphasize procedural ethical conduct, and scientists and engineers generally observe the principles of ethical practice in their everyday research, few receive the formal ethics training that would enable them to navigate through the often subtle ethical complexities that they encounter in the design and decision-making processes related to their research. Even more rare are data that point to the most effective educational model or models for providing such critical training. The University of Kansas Initiative on Ethics Education in Science and Engineering (KUI-EESE) is bringing together experts in ethics, educators, and graduate students in the sciences and engineering, and best practices related to learning methodologies to develop a variety of graduate level ethics education courses. These are being implemented broadly in graduate science and engineering programs at the University of Kansas, Kansas State University, and University of Missouri-Kansas City. The effectiveness of various types and combinations of courses is being assessed in order to articulate and promote best practices and enhance our understanding as to how institutions of higher education can work to produce a deeper understanding of ethical conduct and decision-making in their graduates. These approaches include standard graduate-level exposure to ethical concepts, enrollment in a new stand-alone course, enrollment in a new embedded course, and dual enrollment in stand-alone and embedded courses developed through KUI-EESE. Through a combination of external measures (Vanderbilt University's Responsible Conduct of Research Baseline Assessment Tool) and internal measures (Defining Issues Test, May's Moral Evaluation Scales, and analysis of instructor-produced course portfolios), benchmark ethical understanding is being measured among graduate students and compared with students who have participated in one or more of the KUI-EESE educational initiatives. Broader Impacts: KUI-EESE has been developed to ensure that the lessons learned are not only widely disseminated, but also highly portable. The multi-institution design is providing the principal investigators with data that can be generalized across institutions and used to reinforce the project's focus upon enhancing existing institutional efforts in graduate ethics education in ways that are both feasible and cost-effective. A multifaceted dissemination plan is being used to broadly disseminate the results of this work across the respective campuses of participating institutions and beyond. This plan includes the development of a web-based ethics resource clearinghouse; the creation of an on-line faculty community for sharing ideas, questions, and successes related to graduate ethics education; the encouragement of faculty to present their work with the project at their respective professional conferences and in their respective professional journals; the creation of a multi-institutional Faculty and Student Ethics Colloquium; and the creation of a new interdisciplinary faculty forum for the dissemination of ideas and strategies across academic disciplines.