Examining the Long-Term Impact of an Undergraduate Ethics in Physics Course

Eastern Michigan University, Ypsilanti MI

Investigators

Abstract

More attention is needed on ethics education at the undergraduate level, especially outside the biosciences and engineering fields. This project will examine the impact of a dedicated undergraduate course on ethics in physics, which has offered for twenty years and served over three hundred students. The research team will survey the combined population of former students who attended this course. This provides a unique opportunity to study the long-term impact of a scientific ethics course on the subsequent professional lives of these individuals. As a fundamental goal of science ethics education is to improve the way scientific research is carried out, this project will provide essential information regarding the long-term impact of one approach to ethics education: a dedicated, undergraduate course that caters directly to the disciplinary interests of the students. This information, in turn, has the potential to guide future science curricula, thereby making undergraduate science instruction more compatible with the goal of developing a more effective and ethical science, technology, engineering, and mathematics workforce. The project will assess the relatively understudied area of undergraduate ethics education, using a database of former undergraduate students from an ethics in physics course. The project addresses the main question of whether a stand-alone course in scientific and research ethics has a long-term impact on how individuals detect, approach, and resolve ethical issues in their professional spheres. The research team will collect data from former students who completed the course within a twenty year period. The team will assess how the course material has influenced ethical decision making in their careers. Specifically, the project seeks to address the following: (1) Do alumni retain knowledge from formal ethics training beyond two years after the course? (2) How long do alumni retain and apply knowledge from formal ethics training? (3) In what ways do alumni utilize and apply knowledge gained in an undergraduate ethics course in a professional setting? The team will survey the population of approximately three hundred former students of the course and contact a subset of the respondents for follow-up interviews to help contextualize and interpret the survey data and to gain a more nuanced understanding of the long-term effects of the course. Survey questions will aim to identify specific influences on professional behavior that are connected to the course, and interview data will provide insight into nuances not readily apparent through the survey responses. This project is funded by the Directorate of Mathematical and Physical Sciences and managed by the ER2 Program of the Directorate for Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.