Eac toolkit - assessment tools module

Learning objectives

What are the intended learning objectives or goals for this module? What other goals or learning objectives are possible?

Content objectives described below come from the aacsb ethics education task force report

• Ethical Leadership (EL) : "Expanding ...awareness to include multiple stakeholder interests and ...developing and applying...ethical decision-making skills to organizational decisions in ways that are transparent to...followers." (b) "Executives become moral managers by recognizing and accepting their responsibility for acting as ethical role models."
• Decision-Making (DM) : "Business schools typically teach multiple frameworks for improving students' ethical decision-making skills. Students are encouraged to consider multiple stakeholders and to assess and evaluate using different lenses and enlarged perspectives."
• Social Responsibility (SR) : "Businesses cannot thrive in environments where societal elements such as education, public health, peace and personal security, fidelity to the rule of law, enforcement of contracts, and physical infrastructures are deficient."
• Corporate Governance (CG) :(a) "Knowing the principles and practices of sound, responsible corporate governance can also be an important deterrent to unethical behavior." (b) "Understanding the complex interdependencies between corporate governance and other institutions, such as stock exchanges and regulatory bodies, can be an important factor in managing risk and reputation."

Below are three different sets of skills objectives:

• Skill objectives used at UPRM in various EAC efforts
• The Hastings Center List
• A list presented by Huff and Frey (referenced below) that combines recent research in moral psychology with skills useful for students learning the practice and profession of computing that includes computer science, computer engineering, and software engineering

Uprm ethical empowerment skills list

• UPRM Objectives are described in the context of faculty development workshops in the Science and Engineering Ethics article by Cruz and Frey referenced below:
• Ethical Awareness : “the ability to perceive ethical issues embedded in complex, concrete situations. It requires the exercise of moral imagination which is developed through discussing cases that arise in the real world and in literature.”
• Ethical Evaluation : “ the ability to assess a product or process in terms of different ethical approaches such as utilitarianism, rights theory, deontology, and virtue ethics.” This skill can also be demonstrated by ranking solution alternatives using ethics tests which partially encapsulate ethical theory such as reversibility, harm, and publicity.
• Ethical Integration : “the ability to integrate—not just apply—ethical considerations into an activity (such as a decision, product or process) so that ethics plays an essential, constitutive role in the final results.”
• Ethical Prevention : the ability to (a) uncover potential ethical and social problems latent in a socio-technical system and (b) develop effective counter-measures to prevent these latent problems from materializing or to minimize their harmful or negative impact. "Ethical" is an adjective that modifies “prevention”; hence ethical prevention does not mean the "prevention of the ethical" but the "prevention of the unethical", i.e., the harmful, the untoward, the incorrect, and the bad.
• Value Realization : “the ability to recognize and exploit opportunities for using skills and talents to promote community welfare, enhance safety and health, improve the quality of the environment, and (in general) enhance wellbeing.

Hastings center goals

• Stimulate the moral imagination of students
• Help students recognize moral issues
• Help students analyze key moral concepts and principles
• Elicit from students a sense of responsibility
• Help students to accept the likelihood of ambiguity and disagreement on moral matters, while at the same time attempting to strive for clarity and agreement insofar as it is reasonably attainable (from Pritchard, Reasonable Children, 15)

Goals for ethical education in science and engineering derived from psychological literature (huff and frey)

• Mastering a knowledge of basic facts and understanding and applying basic and intermediate ethical concepts.
• Practicing moral imagination (taking the perspective of the other, generating non-obvious solutions to moral problems under situational constraints, and setting up multiple framings of a situation)
• Learning moral sensitivity
• Encouraging adoption of professional standards into the professional self-concept
• Building ethical community

Instructional / pedagogical strategies

Assessment / assurance of learning

Pedagogical commentary

Any comments or questions regarding this module? (For example: suggestions to authors, suggestions to instructors (how-to), queries or comments directed o EAC community, pitfalls or frustrations, novel ideas/approaches/uses, etc.)

Appendix (annotated)

Additional information or annotations for instructors regarding the Student Module Appendix