This award to the University of Arkansas will allow the PIs, Marty Matlock and Robyn Hannigan, to develop readily available resource for ethical and responsible conduct of research (ERCR) training of undergraduates participating in the NSF Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) program. The PIs plan to 1) Inventory and review at least 40 existing ERCR educational materials; 2) Evaluate their appropriateness and completeness for application in the NSF REU program; 3) Develop new modules for specific use of the BIO REU Program; 4) Pilot test modules at three REU programs; and 5) Develop and implement assessment tools to evaluate effectiveness of the pilot modules. Intellectual Merit: Teaching ethics to undergraduate students is an integral part of the NSF REU program. This requirement for ethics training provides an opportunity to enhance the effectiveness of delivering directed curricula to large and diverse students. The modules and assessment tools will represent new knowledge.
Broader Impacts: This project will benefit all NSF REU programs by providing standardized educational materials to support training in research ethics, and will provide assessment of the effectiveness of developed new modules. Instruments for assessing student learning will be published through the NSF REU program. The results of the project will be posted at the www.bioreu.org website.
Traditionally, ethics education that prepares scientists to engage in responsible research has focused on understanding the rules of ethical research and developing skills for thinking through difficult ethical cases. Current research supports the importance of both of these approaches to helping people become better at thinking through ethical problems. However, that same body of research also indicates that it falls short of preparing people to eventually act ethically when faced with various real world pressures. This project draws from research that has explored the neurobiological foundations of ethical behavior as well as the behavioral psychology literature that informs how people tend to move from moral decision-making to moral action. Modules were created and piloted six times (two consecutive summers on three college campuses). In these modules Biology Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) students experienced two days of ethics workshops that included the following primary components: An interactive discussion supported by short lectures that walked students through the literature and several case studies related to the habits, prompts and levers that are most powerful in promoting or inhibiting ethical action. A guided workshop on understanding moral failure in which students identified moral failures from their own life experience. They then deconstructed those experiences to better understand the habits, prompts, and levers at play during those failures. Then they reconstructed those core elements of their own moral failures in the context of the professional life of a scientist. A case study building workshop where students reviewed the most common ethical failures of scientists in the biological sciences and then developed case studies that they presented to the rest of the REU students using the dilemma discussion method. Based on this funded work a website is under construction that will go live to the public in March, 2015 and will also be directly distributed to Biology REU directors. The website will include teaching guides and background research for those wishing to adopt this ethics curriculum and teach it themselves. Interactive video modules will also be created and hosted on the website that deliver the ethics training virtually for any REU wishing to use it whole or in part.
