The dominant method for ensuring ethical conduct of research among scientists is to teach students formal rules and require them to take a test. This method may be insufficient to support ethics competency throughout an entire scientific career. Using a new framework for career-spanning ethical development - the Mastery Rubric (MR) for the responsible conduct of research (MR-RCR)- this research project addresses that gap, encouraging Ph.D.scientists to gain skills and mastery in ethical research practices throughout their career. In the MR-RCR framework, individuals are taught, and given opportunities to practice and demonstrate, ethical reasoning skills that underpin research integrity and RCR. MR encourages individuals to monitor their own development, so that they know to seek multiple opportunities to learn, practice, and demonstrate their mastery of the specific components of the RCR training objectives. More specifically, to establish and continually augment RCR training and knowledge, scientists create portfolios that can result in certification of journeyman- and master-level skill. The method also supports concrete evaluation and improvement of training opportunities and their consistency with learning objectives, and includes opportunities for mentorship that provide means of cementing communities of ethically-trained scientists. Established standard-setting approaches are used to create test evidence for validation by a team of content experts to estimate reliability and drift in ratings of portfolio evidence.
The central theoretical contribution of this project is that it situates responsible conduct of research and ethical action in collective and individual reflective teaching and learning. This framework has the potential to transform ethics scholarship, as well as ethics training, by emphasizing purposeful and reflective development throughout the career, and to encourage self-regulation by making developmental objectives and performance criteria explicit. The results are disseminated to sixty multi-institutional research centers, including historically black colleges and universities, to professional associations, via publications.
