How Do We Teach Ethics?
Old Dominion takes leading role in national Responsible Conduct of Research project

Author’s Preface: My commentary article, which is reprinted here with permission, was published in The Chronicle Review section of the Jan. 13, 2006, edition of the Chronicle of Higher Education and has sparked considerable positive response. Clearly, academicians throughout the country are concerned about recently reported breeches of research ethics and professional standards, and many are eager to improve the training they provide in these areas.

In recent months, I have been invited to speak at four national educational conferences about the Responsible Conduct of Research (RCR) project and Old Dominion’s initiative on ethics and professional standards that I describe in the article. At these conferences, university professors, graduate deans, provosts and upper-level administrators have acknowledged the need for training and encouraged the work we are doing at Old Dominion in ethics awareness and professional standards.

Since the publication of the Chronicle article, we have completed an analysis of a universitywide survey of attitudes, perceptions and training practices in RCR. Of the 222 faculty, 534 graduate students and 39 graduate administrative staff who responded, approximately 80 percent agreed that RCR training was relevant and important to graduate programs. With respect to mandatory training for graduate students, 50 percent agreed, 20 percent disagreed and 30 percent neither agreed nor disagreed.

About 75 percent agreed that ethics, data management, mentor/trainee relationships, authorship and peer review should be part of an RCR training program. However, only 50 percent agreed that discussions of animal subjects research should be part of the training and 65 percent agreed that human subjects research should be included. Several comments reflect an attitude or perception that RCR is appropriate or necessary only for biomedical sciences: “I’m a graduate student in education. I don’t see a need for RCR training in my field”; “great for science, not necessarily applicable to social sciences”; “I believe that the issue of responsible research applies differently to different departments … it would be unfortunate for arts majors to be required to sit through discussion of the moral and ethical questions contained in responsible human and animal research and the like that applies only to the sciences.”

Students report training lapses
Perceptions differed between faculty and students with respect to the training provided in several RCR topics. For example, only 9.8 percent of the faculty indicated that they were not providing students with training on mentor/trainee relationships, whereas 27 percent of the students indicated that they were not receiving such training. Approximately twice as many students as faculty contended that training was not provided in the areas of data management and ownership, publication practices and research misconduct (falsification, fabrication and plagiarism). These results are consistent with the findings from the only other surveys known to the author to have assessed current attitudes and practices at research universities.

It is clear to the Council of Graduate Schools and to many of the faculty, graduate deans and administrators of several universities, that a more extensive assessment of current practices and programs in ethics, professional standards and responsible conduct of research is needed. The survey developed and used at ODU is under consideration for adoption as a national instrument and for National Science Foundation funding. My goal is to establish a national database, possibly at ODU, by which institutions can analyze their own survey data and compare their results to an aggregated “national” set of data and to peer or peer-aspiration institutions.

Our project has also gathered data to suggest important effects of culture and gender in self-assessed knowledge and decision-making skills in areas of RCR, ethics and professional standards. To date we have gathered data on 35 students who attended the RCR workshop held in spring 2005. Analysis of before and after workshop responses suggest that there are important gender and cultural differences in self-assessed knowledge and decision-making skills in the nine core RCR areas. For example, when asked to evaluate the validity of the statement: “There are well-established standards on the ownership and use of data,” more than 49 percent of the women but none of the men responded that they were “unsure.” To the statement “Ethical decisions are made easily and are generally agreed upon by most individuals,” 29 percent of the international students but none of the domestic students were “unsure.”

Ethical thinking often differs
Further analyses suggest that gender and culture also influence the effects of the workshop on participants’ knowledge and skills. Prior to the workshop, a similar percentage of males (14.3) and females (11.8) indicated they were “unsure” about the statement “A mentor’s needs take precedence over his/her students’ needs.” After the workshop, however, the percentage of males indicating they were unsure declined slightly to 12.5, whereas the percentage of women increased over twofold to 26.3. When asked to evaluate the same statement, 13 percent of domestic and 14 percent of international students were unsure. After the workshop, the percentage of domestic students answering unsure increased to 27 percent but among the international students the unsure response rate fell to 8 percent.

These and other findings from this study need further examination to determine their validity and to explore the underlying causes of these suggested differences among gender and culture. In addition, discipline effects were not tested because of the small numbers of non-science students relative to students in science programs who have taken part in this project.

We are currently working to refine this questionnaire and hope to develop a two-tiered training program. One tier would be a program that would provide training and annual assessments of knowledge and skills in areas common to all disciplines, e.g., ethics, conflict of interest, mentor/trainee relationships, data management and publication. Self-paced and Web-based tutorials, videos and links to additional general and discipline-specific information and practices would be developed. Follow-up seminars and group discussions of case studies with topic experts would allow students and faculty to deepen their understanding and exercise their skills. The second tier would be based in each of the colleges and their disciplines.