Ethics Education and Scientific and Engineering Research: What's Been Learned? What Should Be Done?

National Academy Of Sciences, Washington DC

Investigators

Abstract

As research environments grow ever more complex, institutions and investigators struggle to assure responsible professional development for students and postdoctoral researchers. Interdisciplinary and international research activities add to the challenges, as does the increasing involvement of commercial interests. The complicated interactions of new developments in science, engineering, and technology in society add another layer of difficulty. For several decades, NSF and other research agencies have supported projects to develop responsible conduct of research and mentoring activities and to investigate and assess ethically problematic behaviors and the efficacy of ethics education. Continuing attention to the need for these programs from the public and Congress indicates that this is an opportune time to review progress that has been made and consider how to improve these efforts. The National Academies will host a day and a half workshop in late summer 2008, that brings together the constituencies interested in and responsible for these goals, to examine how best to insure that they are met. The workshop planning committee includes representation from the concerned communities: scientists, engineers, academic administrators, professional associations and publications, experts in fields of science and engineering ethics, and junior researchers. In order to provide for intensive discussion and drafting sessions, participation will be limited to 25 persons. The workshop will include brief presentations and extended discussion about the issues, resources, constituencies, needs, and potential options for next steps from representatives of each of the constituencies. It will identify adoptable materials and promising practices in mentoring and ethics education, examining more and less effective pedagogical methods to address mentoring and ethics education in both research and educational activities, and providing examples of successful approaches and outcomes. The discussion will attend to elements of the responsible development of professionals more broadly conceived than traditional responsible conduct of research topics such as falsification and plagiarism, emphasizing attention to disciplinary breadth and non-medical settings. How to build bridges between research investigators and scholars and researchers with expertise in relevant domains of science and engineering ethics will be discussed and positive examples may be helpfully delineated. Research findings and effective training methods, educational materials, and practices will be identified, along with suggestions for dissemination of ethics training tools to users, and for future research, educational innovations, and outreach activities. Finally, the workshop attendees will identify gaps in the knowledge base about what works in ethics education and mentoring in ethics and related areas for all of the relevant constituencies, providing a basis for planning future research and educational assessments. Attendees will draft summaries of the workshop discussions; workshop rapporteurs and Academies' staff will use these submissions to author an overall workshop summary that will be published on the Academies' website as well as in a printed version, and a promotional brochure about the workshop summary will be broadly disseminated. The Academies will publicize the availability of the workshop summary and associated Academies' programs and publications widely. Attendees will talk about the workshop at varied professional society and academic association meetings, and describe it in their newsletters and journals. Dissemination of the workshop summary will be of broad practical and intellectual use to investigators and institutions attempting to respond to the requirements concerning ethics training and mentoring in the new America COMPETES Act HR 2272, Section 7009.