Collaborative Research: Practical Ethical Instruction with Expert-Analyzed Cases

这个项目对认知过程进行了系统的研究，帮助学生学习与专业领域中的实践伦理推理有关的重要概念和技能。调查人员将从三个一般来源建立一个案例、策略和分析语料库：(1)取自工程伦理学主要教科书的案例和练习；(2)工程伦理学家和专业工程师提供的知识、推理技能和案例范例，这些都是调查人员将获取和分析的；(3)调查人员先前对新手和经验丰富的伦理师在分析实际伦理困境时所采用的不同策略的实证研究的结果。作为这项研究的结果，调查人员发现，经验丰富的伦理推理者谨慎地识别问题并具体说明特定职业角色义务建议特定行动的条件，他们阐述将影响对问题的道德分析的条件，部分通过提出问题的假设性变体，以及他们根据他们得出的结论适用于问题的条件来证明解决方案的合理性。研究人员将开发利用语料库挑战和指导新手进行手动辅导干预的技术，并评估这些技术的教学价值。他们将展示一组新手的经验分析，并邀请他们将这些结论与他们自己的推理进行比较。目标是评估新手如何理解假设变量的使用，以及它们在分析问题时的道德意义。对照组不会接触到专家的推理和结论，他们的结论将与对相同问题的实验分析进行比较。实验设计还将允许研究人员对比新手从语料库分析问题的方案，并将它们与对相同问题的有经验的或专家的分析进行比较。结果将在期刊和会议上报告，并可以成为开发计算模型和设计互动辅导系统的基础。其意义在于更好地理解在实践伦理教育中广泛使用的教学策略。这项研究将阐明专家将问题与变量进行比较的分析如何帮助学生学习伦理推理的过程。

This project undertakes a systematic study of cognitive processes that support students in learning important concepts and skills concerning practical ethical reasoning in a professional domain. The investigators will build a corpus of cases, strategies, and analyses from three general sources: (1) the case examples and exercises taken from leading textbooks in engineering ethics (2) the knowledge, reasoning skills and case examples provided by engineering ethicists and professional engineers as revealed in protocols which the investigators will acquire and analyze, and (3) the findings of the investigators' previous empirical study of different strategies for analyzing practical ethical dilemmas employed by novice and more experienced ethical reasoners. As a result of that study, the investigators found that experienced ethical reasoners are careful to identify issues and to specify conditions under which specific professional role obligations recommend particular actions, that they elaborate conditions which would affect the moral analysis of a problem, in part through posing hypothetical variations of the problem, and that they justify resolutions in terms of those conditions which they conclude apply in the problem. The investigators will develop techniques for using the corpus to challenge and instruct novices in a manual tutoring intervention and assess the pedagogical value of those techniques. They will present an experimental group of novices aspects of the experienced analyses and invite them to compare those conclusions with their own reasoning. The goal will be to assess how novices understand the use of hypothetical variations and their moral significance for the analysis of the problem. A control group will not be exposed to the experts' reasoning and conclusions, and their conclusions will be compared with the experimental analysis of the same problems. The experimental design will also allow investigators to contrast the protocols of novices analyzing problems from the corpus and compare them to the experienced or expert analyses of the same problems. Results will be reported in journals and at meetings and can form the basis for developing a computational model and designing an interactive tutoring system. The significance lies in the development of a better understanding of a pedagogical strategy widely used in practical ethical instruction. The study will shed light on how experts' analyses comparing problems to variations can assist students in learning the process of ethical reasoning.