Collaborative Research: Project Incubation - New Jersey Institute of Technology Campus Alignment Review of Ethics

今天的美国公民需要对他们通过社交媒体、新闻故事或专业交流所遇到的科学和技术主张进行称职的评估。他们识别和使用可核实事实的能力影响到他们的个人选择和积极参与公共讨论。从事科学和技术职业的专业人员需要在处理他们的工作时考虑到伦理因素，包括他们在面对持续和新的挑战时做出的专业选择如何影响公民的日常生活。鉴于科学和工程研究的广泛社会影响，确保研究的道德和负责任的行为对美国公众的福利和促进科学进步至关重要。大学必须满足这一需求，无论是作为研究场所，还是最关键的是，作为未来STEM研究人员和工作者的教育者。在这个项目中，研究人员检查了描述新泽西理工学院对道德的承诺的机构信息与学生在课堂内外遇到的道德的一致性。道德教育在两个方面符合公民的关键评估需求：首先，通过确保未来的科技研究人员在工作中接受强有力的道德培训，其次，通过确保高等教育让学生进行道德推理练习。伦理推理的技能有助于学生的个人、职业和公民成长。来自哈佛大学、斯坦福大学和南佛罗里达大学的研究人员是国家道德项目(NEP)研究联盟的成员，他们将与新泽西理工学院(NJIT)的研究人员合作，建立一个基于证据的报告，说明一所大学对道德教育的承诺。采用混合方法，我们将测试结合数字人文、心理学和设计思维的新方法和传统方法的工具和技术。这些工具是由国家教育计划设计的，目的是使广大高等教育机构在审计和转变伦理和负责任的研究方法方面受益。在这个项目中，我们将重点放在一致性上：确定与机构、教师和学生的陈述和看法的一致性，包括教师目标、活动和评估技术、学生的看法，以及声明的机构对道德的承诺。除了帮助NJIT审查自己的伦理和负责任的研究方法，并提出未来的机构转型建议以满足确定的需求外，该项目还是NEP第一次在校园范围内全面测试其校园对齐道德审查的机会，到目前为止，该审查仅在不同的校园零星应用。这项研究的结果将通过NEP网站、国家工程院在线伦理中心、在国家会议上的学术报告和学术期刊上的出版物来传播。通过这个项目开发的数据将通过开放科学框架向其他研究人员和公众开放。这一奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

Today’s US citizens need to be competent evaluators of scientific and technical claims that they encounter through social media, news stories, or professional communication. Their ability to identify and use verifiable facts impacts their personal choices and their active participation in public discussion. Professionals in scientific and technical careers need to approach their work with an understanding of ethical considerations, which include how the professional choices that they make in the face of ongoing and novel challenges impact citizens’ everyday lives. Given the broad social impacts of scientific and engineering research, ensuring the ethical and responsible conduct of research is vital to the welfare of the American public and promotes the progress of science. Universities must meet this need, both as sites of research and, most critically, as educators of future STEM researchers and workers. In this project, researchers examine how well institutional messaging that describes New Jersey Institute of Technology’s commitment to ethics aligns with students’ encounters with ethics in and out of the classroom. Ethics education aligns with the critical evaluation needs of citizens in two ways: first, by ensuring that the scientific and technological researchers of the future come to their work with robust training in ethics and next, by ensuring that higher education gives students practice in ethical reasoning. Skill in ethical reasoning facilitates students’ personal, vocational, and civic growth. Lessons learned from this study at this university will be used to improve alignment of ethics education at other US universities.Researchers from Harvard University, Stanford University, and the University of South Florida who are members of a research consortium, the National Ethics Project (NEP), join forces with investigators from New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT) to build an evidence-based account of an institution’s commitment to ethics education. Employing mixed-methodologies, we will test tools and techniques that combine novel and traditional methods from the digital humanities, psychology, and design thinking. These tools were designed by the NEP to benefit a broad range of institutions of higher education in auditing and transforming approaches to Ethical and Responsible Research. For this project, we will focus on alignment: identifying consistency with institution, faculty, and student statements and perceptions that include instructor goals, activities, and assessment techniques, student perception, and stated institutional commitment to ethics. In addition to helping NJIT examine its own approach to ethical and responsible research and seeding a future Institutional Transformation proposal to address identified needs, this project is the first campus-wide opportunity for the NEP to fully test its Campus Alignment Review of Ethics, which to date has been applied only piecemeal on separate campuses. Results from this research will be disseminated via the NEP website, the National Academy of Engineering’s Online Ethics Center, scholarly presentations at national conferences and publications in scholarly journals. Data developed through this project will be available to other researchers and to the public through the Open Science Framework.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.