EESE: Graduate Virtue Ethics Education in Science and Engineering

科学家和工程师应该接受伦理培训，这一点得到了广泛的认同。但在如何最好地将伦理学融入科学和工程教育方面，还没有达成共识。对于如何实现以及如何评估帮助科学家和工程师做出良好的伦理决策的预期结果，人们知之甚少。这一研究和教育项目解决了道德教育中的一个主要空白：将道德教育与道德决策联系起来。PI将开发一种替代的游戏方法，寻求将科学家和工程师的道德教育重塑为更多地在逼真的游戏环境中练习道德行为，而不是通过内容交付系统记住规则的问题。PI的方法建立在不断增长的关于游戏教学用途的文献基础上，以及他自己在先前NSF支持下开发的研究伦理游戏的原型。游戏让学生沉浸在他们必须决定该做什么的情境中，而不是指导学生“做正确的事情”，然后测试他们是否知道“做正确的事情”。游戏环境是培养实用道德技能和养成性格习惯的训练场。与任何预先打包的、静态的和单向的内容相比，游戏更真实地反映了科学家和工程师所面临的模棱两可、动态和复杂的情况。在这个项目中，PI将检验伦理游戏可以改善伦理决策的假设。这将需要完成三个原型研究伦理游戏，促进来自多个机构的不同研究生群体进行游戏，通过迭代过程改进游戏，使用经过充分验证的评估工具评估游戏的可玩性和对伦理决策的影响，并传播游戏和最终研究结果。布罗德影响：本项目增进了对伦理教育中最不被理解的领域的知识：如何评估伦理教育和伦理决策之间的联系。通过使用美德伦理理论和采取互动游戏的方法，该项目有可能改变新一代科学家和工程师的伦理教育。评估将不仅涉及用户对开发的游戏的参与和满意度，还将涉及他们在开发现实世界背景下的道德决策所需技能方面的改进。项目结果将广泛传播；将向伙伴机构提供游戏，并对其进行调整，以纳入UNT的研究生RCR培训方案。

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. 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 research and education project addresses a major gap in ethics education: connecting ethics education to ethical decision making. The PI will develop an alternative, gaming approach that 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. The PI's approach builds on the growing literature on pedagogical uses of games, as well as his own prototype research ethics games developed with prior NSF support. 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, the PI will test the hypothesis that an ethics game can improve ethical decision making. This will entail finalizing three prototype research ethics games, facilitating game play with diverse graduate student populations from multiple institutions, improving the games through an iterative process, assessing game playability and impacts on ethical decision making using a well-validated evaluation tool, and disseminating the games and final research results.Broader Impacts: 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. Project results will be disseminated broadly; the games will be made available to the partner institutions and adapted for inclusion in UNT's RCR training program for graduate students.