Collaborative Research: Standard: Comparison of Communications across Campus Cultures (The 4C Project): Toward Evidence-based Customization of Learning Experiences

STEM专业人员的道德行为对科学进步、国家健康进步和繁荣福利至关重要。因此，STEM受训者必须接受适当的教育，以成熟为负责任的专业人士，表现出对STEM中道德挑战的认识和理解。“一刀切”的STEM道德培训能培养出训练有素的STEM员工吗？这个合作项目的目标是通过数据定义STEM伦理学习社区，然后制定一项战略，将社区与对他们有效的资源相匹配。通过这项研究，来自四所不同高等院校的数百名STEM学员将分别提供个人人口统计和学术信息、调查数据和写作样本。生成的数据集将被分析，以确定哪些共同品质定义了道德STEM学习社区。然后，基于证据的学习社区识别将为将其与已经为伦理STEM教育开发的许多资源和经验的子集进行战略匹配提供基础。本研究将同时在不同选区和文化的校园进行：(1)圣玛丽学院（Saint Mary's College），一所女子学院；(2)天主教研究型大学圣母大学；(3)泽维尔大学，历史上的黑人学院或大学（HBCU）；(4)弗吉尼亚大学，一所公立研究型大学。所采用的方法将包括管理和分析五种有效的量表（学习风格、个性、道德关注、道德行为和环境取向），以及对三种不同格式（电子日志条目、在线讨论论坛和Twitter）的学生写作进行自动文本分析。为了开发和测试本研究中出现的差异化教学原则，来自每个机构的研究人员将设计并提供试点学习经验，将单一的既定资源或道德教育方法与一个定义的学习社区相结合。由此产生的案例报告和基本原则预计将在《STEM伦理学习社区战略参与手册》中得到阐述，并在STEM研究网络、科学和工程伦理社区、非正式科学和教育网络以及K-12科学教育网络中分发。

Ethical behavior of STEM professionals is essential for the progress of science, advancement of the national health, and prosperity and welfare. Therefore STEM trainees must receive the appropriate education to mature into responsible professionals that display an awareness and understanding of ethical challenges within STEM. Does "one size fits all" STEM ethics training result in a well-trained STEM workforce?The goal of this collaborative project is to define, through data, STEM ethics learning communities and then develop a strategy for matching communities with resources effective for them. Through this study, hundreds of STEM trainees from four distinct higher learning institutions will each provide individual demographic and academic information, survey data, and writing samples. The data sets generated will be analyzed to determine which common qualities define ethical STEM learning communities. Evidence-based identification of learning communities will then provide the basis for strategically matching them with a subset of the many resources and experiences already developed for ethical STEM education. This study will be conducted simultaneously at campuses with different constituencies and cultures: (1) Saint Mary's College, an all-women's college; (2) the University of Notre Dame, a Catholic research university; (3) Xavier University, a Historically Black College or University (HBCU); and (4) the University of Virginia, a public research university. The methods employed will include administration and analysis of five validated scales (for learning style, personality, moral concern, moral action, and environmental orientation) and automated text analysis of student writings in three different formats (electronic journal entry, online discussion forum, and Twitter). To develop and test principles of differentiated instruction emerging from this research, investigators from each institution will design and offer pilot learning experiences combining a single established resource or approach for ethics education with one defined learning community. The resulting case reports and underlying principles are expected to be articulated in the Strategic Engagement of Learning Communities for Ethical STEM Handbook and distributed across STEM research networks, the science and engineering ethics community, informal science and education networks, and K-12 science education networks.