Examining the Long-Term Impact of an Undergraduate Ethics in Physics Course

需要更多地关注本科阶段的伦理教育，特别是在生物科学和工程领域之外。该项目将研究一门专门的物理学伦理学本科课程的影响，该课程已经开设了20年，服务了300多名学生。研究小组将调查所有上过这门课的学生。这为研究科学伦理课程对这些人随后的职业生涯的长期影响提供了一个独特的机会。由于科学伦理教育的基本目标是改善科学研究的开展方式，本项目将提供关于伦理教育的一种方法的长期影响的基本信息：一门专门的本科课程，直接迎合学生的学科兴趣。这些信息反过来又有可能指导未来的科学课程，从而使本科科学教学更符合培养更有效、更有道德的科学、技术、工程和数学劳动力的目标。该项目将利用物理学伦理学课程前本科生的数据库，评估本科生伦理教育中研究相对不足的领域。该项目解决了一个主要问题，即科学和研究伦理的独立课程是否对个人如何在其专业领域发现、处理和解决伦理问题产生长期影响。研究小组将从在20年内完成课程的前学生那里收集数据。该小组将评估课程材料如何影响他们职业生涯中的道德决策。具体而言，该项目旨在解决以下问题：(1)在课程结束两年后，校友是否仍能从正式的道德培训中获得知识？(2)校友保留和应用正规道德培训知识的时间有多长？(3)校友如何在专业环境中利用和应用在本科道德课程中获得的知识？该团队将调查大约300名该课程的前学生，并联系一部分受访者进行后续访谈，以帮助背景化和解释调查数据，并对该课程的长期影响有更细致的了解。调查问题将旨在确定与课程相关的专业行为的具体影响，访谈数据将提供对细微差别的洞察，这些细微差别在调查回答中不易明显。该项目由数学和物理科学理事会资助，由社会、行为和经济科学理事会ER2项目管理。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

More attention is needed on ethics education at the undergraduate level, especially outside the biosciences and engineering fields. This project will examine the impact of a dedicated undergraduate course on ethics in physics, which has offered for twenty years and served over three hundred students. The research team will survey the combined population of former students who attended this course. This provides a unique opportunity to study the long-term impact of a scientific ethics course on the subsequent professional lives of these individuals. As a fundamental goal of science ethics education is to improve the way scientific research is carried out, this project will provide essential information regarding the long-term impact of one approach to ethics education: a dedicated, undergraduate course that caters directly to the disciplinary interests of the students. This information, in turn, has the potential to guide future science curricula, thereby making undergraduate science instruction more compatible with the goal of developing a more effective and ethical science, technology, engineering, and mathematics workforce. The project will assess the relatively understudied area of undergraduate ethics education, using a database of former undergraduate students from an ethics in physics course. The project addresses the main question of whether a stand-alone course in scientific and research ethics has a long-term impact on how individuals detect, approach, and resolve ethical issues in their professional spheres. The research team will collect data from former students who completed the course within a twenty year period. The team will assess how the course material has influenced ethical decision making in their careers. Specifically, the project seeks to address the following: (1) Do alumni retain knowledge from formal ethics training beyond two years after the course? (2) How long do alumni retain and apply knowledge from formal ethics training? (3) In what ways do alumni utilize and apply knowledge gained in an undergraduate ethics course in a professional setting? The team will survey the population of approximately three hundred former students of the course and contact a subset of the respondents for follow-up interviews to help contextualize and interpret the survey data and to gain a more nuanced understanding of the long-term effects of the course. Survey questions will aim to identify specific influences on professional behavior that are connected to the course, and interview data will provide insight into nuances not readily apparent through the survey responses. This project is funded by the Directorate of Mathematical and Physical Sciences and managed by the ER2 Program of the Directorate for Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.