Education in science and engineering fosters personal and professional values as well as technical knowledge and skills. Traditionally, the former kind of educational experience has been more implicit than explicit. Recently, questions have arisen about the moral content of professional training and conduct, and about how value conflicts affecting professional training ought to be resolved. Co-sponsored by the Committee on Scientific Freedom and Responsibility of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Council of Graduate Schools in the U.S., and Sigma Xi's Committee on Science and Society, this project will compile and provide an assessment of current knowledge about policies and practices that affect professional values in graduate education in science and undergraduate and professional education in engineering. Working papers on the topics of academic guidelines, research sponsorship, misconduct, and ethics in engineering education will be prepared. Plans and pretests for a survey of students and faculty, to identify how socialization occurs and knowledge of institutional policies and procedures on these matters, will be developed. In addition project staff will solicit, devise, and pretest scenarios of cases in which ethical or value issues for students and faculty have arisen. Besides identifying the issues and developing a plan for further study of them, the project will establish contacts with investigators and organizations with related interests. Results from the project will include an initial "state of the art" assessment of relevant literature and practice and the identification of related programs. Several from the series of working papers should merit publication. Finally, the co-sponsors will develop a comprehensive plan for further work. This project will define the substantive issues and appropriate methodologies to investigate normative components in science and engineering education. The investigative team and consultants are very well qualified to undertake the project, and the institutional co- sponsors are most appropriate. Results are likely to be revealing, useful, and widely disseminated. The research design is very appropriate for this exploratory phase, and costs are reasonable. Total support is recommended in the amount of $47,572.
