KU News Release

KU team uses two new grants to clarify blurry lines of ethics

LAWRENCE — After answering only half of a professor’s research survey to collect data, a volunteer stops, becomes combative and demands to withdraw from the study. The researcher faces a perplexing ethical dilemma: How should this unexpected result be recorded? Should she just let him go or cajole the volunteer to continue? Should the volunteer’s partial responses be included?

How to work through such dilemmas will gradually become part of the culture at the University of Kansas with help from the National Science Foundation and the Council of Graduate Schools. The organizations have awarded KU two grants worth a total of $315,000 to study how to best incorporate ethics education into science and engineering coursework.

Studies show few U.S. graduate schools offer classes to train students on how to navigate through ethical dilemmas related to research.

Other ethics problems may arise in maintaining independence and objectivity when using private grant funds. Some may involve conflicts of interest, research misconduct or the use of human or animal subjects.

Studies from other universities show that though faculty members and department heads report regularly discussing ethics in classes, students say they receive little ethics training.

“There is a disconnect,” said Saeed Farokhi, associate dean of the Graduate School at KU and principal investigator on the NSF grant. “Faculty members think they do an adequate or decent job, but students tell us through those surveys that they did not receive an adequate education (in ethics).”

Farokhi says the NSF project will develop three options to remedy the problem. One option would create a “stand-alone” ethics course for science and engineering students and the other would be to embed ethics content throughout general course curriculum. The third option will offer students a combination of the other two.

KU is teaming up with counterparts at Kansas State University and the University of Missouri-Kansas City on the $300,000 NSF grant, forming the University of Kansas Initiative on Ethics Education in Science and Engineering. The partner institutions will help determine how “portable” the developed curriculum will be, or how well it works for students and faculty at other institutions.

The CGS grant partners with NSF and is worth $15,000 to expand programs created the past two years in the social and behavioral sciences to science and engineering. One feature of the new grant is to prepare students in the sciences to discuss controversial issues in science in public forums and with the media.

The research will include holding faculty ethics workshops with members from each of the three institutions to train and educate them on the different courses.

The long-term goal of the grant is to establish a comprehensive approach to ethics education so graduate students in all fields are exposed to ethical concepts in a variety of contexts.

“It cuts across all areas, not just students cheating or faculty making up data,” said Farokhi.

“The two new grants recognize the strides we have made to increase the emphasis on ethics education and the quality of our programs as best practice models,” said Diana Carlin, dean of the Graduate School and principal investigator of the grant from CGS.

This is the second time KU has been awarded with the CGS grant. This year, it is one of only two to be renewed.

Farokhi is working with three other co-principal investigators on the NSF grant: Richard De George, distinguished professor of philosophy; Dan Bernstein, professor of psychology and director of the Center for Teaching Excellence; and Douglas May, professor of business and co-director of the International Center for Ethics in Business.

The researchers will evaluate students before and after the implementation of the ethics programs to test the how well the different approaches worked and what effect teaching styles had on the students’ learning.

-30-

The University of Kansas is a major comprehensive research and teaching university. University Relations is the central public relations office for KU's Lawrence campus.