1.1 Eac toolkit - instructor module for uprm ethics bowl activity  (Page 2/5)

This particular version of the ethics bowl has gone through four stages.

• First, judges from Humanities and Engineering were invited to the class, and, ona Monday-Wednesday-Friday schedule within the confines of a 50 minute class, the entire competition took place and scores were calculated and announced. Each student team debated twice. But assessment results showed that students wanted more time to carry out each stage of the competition and they wanted more feedback from the judges.
• For this reason, the second phase of the competition was carried out during the longer class sessions of the Tuesday-Thursday schedule. While students had more time to formulate their arguments and responses, they still asked for a more relaxed schedule that included more feedback from the judges.
• In the third phase, the debates were held outside the regular class schedule as determined by the students, usually on Saturdays and holidays. While this generally worked well for the students, it became difficult to find engineering and humanities faculty members willing to give up 6 to 8 hours of their weekend.
• In the fourth phase, two student debating teams compete during the regular Monday-Wednesday-Friday schedule. The first team defends its case in the first class period. The second receives and discusses its case in the following class period. Along with the two debating teams, two peer review teams serve as judges asking questions during the questioning period and scoring at the end of each class period. Finally, a third class period is given over to the peer review teams announcing and explaining their scoring. The advantage of this version of the competition is it solves both the time and feedback concerns that persisted through the prior instantiations of the debate.

The authors of this module have discussed issues concerning the integration of the Ethics Bowl into the classroom in a paper entitled, "The Ethics Bowl in Engineering Ethics at the University of Puerto Rico - Mayaguez. (Teaching Ethics, 4(2), Spring 2004: 15-32.) This paper discusses the assessment methodology used and summaries of the assessments of the first two years of the competition. After itemizing what the authors beieve are the considerable accomplishments of the classroom activity, it goes on to mention several ethics bowl challenges. Ethics bowl assessment has continued after the publication of this article. Two particular challenges have emerged: clarifying as much as possible the judging criteria and providing the debating teams as much constructive feedback as possible. This instructor module and the corresponding studentmodule describe ethics bowl innovations that attempt to respond to these assessment issues.

An article by Michael Davis, "Five Kinds of Ethics Across the Curriculum: An Introduction to Four Experiments with One Kind", discusses this classroom use of the Ethics Bowl as an instance of "professional ethics across the curriculum." In a footnote worth quoting, Davis distinguishes the Engineering Ethics Bowl held at UPRM from the Intercollegiate Ethics Bowl that has come to form a central part of the yearly APPE meetings: "This description of the ethics bowl differs from Robert F. Ladenson, "The Educational Significance of the Ethics Bowl," Teaching Ethics 1(1) March 2001: 63-78, in at least three ways. First, it describes the process of transplanting the ethics bowl to a more or less non-English speaking environment. Second, it it desribes an effort to use the ethics bowl for professional ethics across the engineering curriculum (rather than, as Ladenson presents it, use it to do social issues across the curriculum). And third, it it describes the process of making the ethics bowl fit the time-constraints of an ordinary (engineering) classroom."