Institutional Transformation: Cultivating an ethical STEM culture through an integrated undergraduate general education

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This project will study the implementation and effectiveness of a university wide ethical reasoning curriculum. The project will identify and assess the culture of ethics education that emerges from "Pathways to General Education" at Virginia Tech. The project will do a systematic analysis of institutional transformation. It will focus on the culture of STEM ethics by tracing the implementation of ethical reasoning into a new general education curriculum. The research will evaluate the transferability of this approach to other institutions. The project will contribute to broadening students' expertise beyond their field of study and to provide competencies that will transfer to the workplace. Summer institutes, webinars, on-line training modules and workshops will be developed for faculty to promote ethical considerations in teaching and doing STEM. The findings of this project will be of interest to faculty members, students, university administrators and businesses. The project will include multi-pronged evaluations of the efficacy of a new curriculum program at Virginia Tech. It will understand the dynamics of the individual, collective, and institutional processes evident in their implementation; and test the overall utility of the ABCD theory of change as employed in this transformation effort. There are four categories of anticipated impacts from this project: 1) evaluation for direct improvement in faculty ethics teaching competency, 2) evaluation of students' ethics learning competency, 3) estimation of changes to ethical climate in an R1 STEM focused university, and 4) dissemination of findings and best practices from this project's research to other institutions. The project will collect qualitative and quantitative data through interviews, surveys and participant observation.