As information technologies are becoming important tools in schools and in mainstream society, families and schools will bear an important responsibility to assist young people in gaining the moral reasoning, motivation, and control to engage in ethical behavior while using these new technologies. The objective of the proposed study is to investigate how high school students analyze issues related to the ethical use of information and communication technologies, including the Internet. The study will examine ethical issues pertaining to copyright infringement, computer security violations (hacking), disrespectful speech (flaming, harassment, violation of privacy), and accessing or publishing potentially harmful material (pornography and hate literature). The study will seek to determine the factors that influence students' analyses of scenarios that describe inappropriate acts, such as students' developmental characteristics, life situations (gender, amount of computer use), knowledge of the law, the nature of the act (type of victim or amount of harm), and the reasoning process that students engage in, in making their determinations. Knowledge gained through the study will provide the basis for the development of effective environmental, instructional, and intervention strategies to assist students in gaining the moral reasoning, motivation, and control to engage in ethical behavior while using new technologies. The subjects for the research will be 200 high school students who have had Internet access through home or school for a period of at least one year. The study will make use of three standardized measurement instruments for the measurement of cognitive-moral development, empathic tendencies, and self-understanding. An information technology ethics questionnaire will be developed for the purposes of this study. The questionnaire will be designed to investigate various aspects of students' evaluation of the appropriateness of the acts that involve the use of information technologies, their knowledge of rules, and their reasoning process. Both quantitative and qualitative data will be gathered through the questionnaire. The analysis of the data will reveal potential relationships between cognitive moral development, empathic tendencies, self-understanding and the subjects' analysis of various information technology-related acts.
