Proposal to the Ethics Education in Science and Engineering Program, National Science Foundation: Role-Play Scenarios for Teaching Responsible Conduct of Research

Abstract

We propose to develop and assess role-play scenarios to teach central topics in the responsible conduct of research (RCR) to graduate students in science and engineering. Together the scenarios will cover plagiarism, authorship, conflict of interest, interpersonal conflicts in mentoring, and concerns about compliance with research regulations on human participants in research, animal subjects, or hazardous substances. Two scenarios will present potential whistleblowing situations. Intellectual merit: Few previous studies have carefully assessed the effectiveness of role-play in teaching ethics. We will conduct a rigorous, systematic assessment of role-play, using multiple methods, with a diverse group of graduate students. We will examine whether role-play helps students identify moral issues in research, understand multiple perspectives in ethical disputes, and negotiate practical solutions to moral problems. We will document how students’ conceptions of RCR change. We will determine whether students retain their new knowledge and skills. For this project, we will draw on our previous experience in the scholarship of teaching and learning. Broader impacts: Collaborating with both graduate and undergraduate students, we will develop educational materials that can be adopted by graduate programs in all science and engineering departments. These materials will be disseminated through professional meetings and archived online. We believe that by engaging students through the role-play scenarios, we would teach graduate students to handle ethical problems in RCR effectively. As an outcome of this project, we expect to find that long after students have participated in role-play sessions, they will recall the lessons of those sessions, and they will be able to apply those lessons to a wide range of ethical problems that they may encounter in their professional careers