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

今天的美国公民需要成为他们通过社交媒体、新闻报道或专业交流遇到的科学和技术主张的称职评估者。他们识别和使用可验证事实的能力影响了他们的个人选择和他们对公共讨论的积极参与。从事科学和技术职业的专业人员需要理解道德因素来处理他们的工作，包括他们在面对持续和新的挑战时所做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，作为研究场所，最重要的是，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道德承诺的机构信息与学生在课堂内外遇到的道德问题是否一致。伦理教育以两种方式与公民的批判性评估需求保持一致：首先，通过确保未来的科学和技术研究人员在从事他们的工作时接受强有力的伦理培训，其次，通过确保高等教育为学生提供伦理推理的实践。道德推理技能有助于学生的个人、职业和公民成长。从这所大学的研究中吸取的经验教训将用于改善美国其他大学的道德教育。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伦理项目（NEP）研究联盟的成员，他们与新泽西理工学院（NJIT）的研究人员联手，建立了一个基于证据的机构伦理教育承诺的账户。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颖和传统方法的工具和技术。这些工具是由NEP设计的，旨在使高等教育机构在审计和转变伦理和负责任研究方法方面受益。对于这个项目，我们将关注一致性：确定与机构、教师和学生的陈述和看法的一致性，包括教师的目标、活动和评估技术、学生的看法以及机构对道德的承诺。除了帮助新泽西理工大学检查自己的道德和负责任的研究方法，并为未来的机构转型提案提供种子，以满足已确定的需求之外，该项目是NEP第一次在全校范围内全面测试其校园道德校准审查的机会，迄今为止，该审查仅在个别校园零星应用。这项研究的结果将通过NEP网站、国家工程院在线伦理中心、国家会议上的学术报告和学术期刊上的出版物发布。通过该项目开发的数据将通过开放科学框架提供给其他研究人员和公众。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。

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.