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"Graduate Education in Research Ethics for Sciencists and Engineers" is a project funded by the National Science Foundation (SES 0629377) to design and integrate a pilot program in research ethics for graduate students in science and engineering to prepare them to face the complex and encompassing ethical and social issues that arise in professional activity. This project is being built around three key components: (1) Three specially designed graduate student workshops, a freestanding course, and a capstone activity will provide students with problem-solving skills and a conceptual framework in research ethics; (2) Participants in faculty development workshops will design research ethics cases and materials to provide graduate students with practice and guidance in confronting ethical challenges in research; (3) Faculty mentoring workshops will foster collaboration between faculty experienced with integrating ethidcs and those new to the task. This and others in a series of modules in Connexions will describe these activities and undergo modifications and improvements as these activities evolve and are tried out at different locations. The conversion of this workshop activity into module form has come about through the EAC Toolkit project, NSF SES 0551779.

Module introduction

In a third workshop, you will work with the moral objective of ethical integration which builds upon ethical awareness and ethical evaluation. Two widely used decision-making frameworks will be presented. Thus, using a case presented by a faculty mentor, students will practice the framework by bringing the case to a resolution. You will be provided with decision alternatives that respond generically to ethical problems (gather information, negotiate, oppose, exit, etc.), rank these generic solutions, and then design and justify a decision of your own. This workshop allows you to continue practicing the resolution of moral conflicts (skills developed in the second workshop) and, in addition, to work on integrating moral considerations with practical ones. The case analyses that you develop in this workshop will serve as a preliminary draft. Then you will form work groups that will continue to refine their provisional decisions, analyses, and justifications after the workshop. This will lead to the next activity where your group, along with others, will prepare a poster presentation on your case analysis to be presented in a capstond activity called, the "Graduate Research Ethics Banquet."

Case analysis workshop
Objectives Activities
Students learn to integrate ethical considerations in to the causistic model of case analysis Presentation: Decision-making framework in research ethics based on casuistic model
Students learn to integrate ethical considerations into a rational decision-making framework common in the business environment Presentation: Decision-making framework in research ethics based on rational decision model (sevel-step model)
Students learn to integrate ethical considerations (principles, concepts, theories, and values) into day-to-day decision-making in research activities Reflection Exercise: Students are presented with scenarios that raise an ethical problem and create a decision point. Students then rank alternative solutions, choose an alternative, and justify their choice

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Source:  OpenStax, Graduate education in research ethics for scientists and engineers. OpenStax CNX. Dec 14, 2009 Download for free at http://cnx.org/content/col10408/1.3
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