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Connecting Past with Present: A Mixed-Methods Science Ethics Course and its Evaluation

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Abstract

We present a graduate science ethics course that connects cases from the historical record to present realities and practices in the areas of social responsibility, authorship, and human/animal experimentation. This content is delivered with mixed methods, including films, debates, blogging, and practicum; even the instructional team is mixed, including a historian of science and a research scientist. What really unites all of the course’s components is the experiential aspect: from acting in historical debates to participating in the current scientific enterprise. The course aims to change the students’ culture into one deeply devoted to the science ethics cause. To measure the sought after cultural change, we developed and validated a relevant questionnaire. Results of this questionnaire from students who took the course, demonstrate that the course had the intended effect on them. Furthermore, results of this questionnaire from controls indicate the need for cultural change in that cohort. All these quantitative results are reinforced by qualitative outcomes.

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Notes

  1. Please note that we use the term science broadly, covering all the STEM fields.

  2. Atomic Energy Commission/Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

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Acknowledgments

This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation via grant # 1135357, entitled ‘EESE-Experiencing Ethics’ (Pavlidis et al. 2011–2014). Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this paper are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the funding agency.  The authors would like to thank Sarah K. A. Pfatteicher for her valuable feedback.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Physics, University of Houston, TIMES, 373 Health and Biomedical Sciences Center (HBSC), Houston, TX, 77204-6022, USA

    Ioanna Semendeferi

  2. Department of Statistics, Athens University of Economics and Business, 76 Patission St., 10434, Athens, Greece

    Panagiotis Tsiamyrtzis

  3. Computational Physiology Laboratory, University of Houston, TIMES, 373 Health and Biomedical Sciences Center (HBSC), Houston, TX, 77204-6022, USA

    Malcolm Dcosta & Ioannis Pavlidis

Authors
  1. Ioanna Semendeferi
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  2. Panagiotis Tsiamyrtzis
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  3. Malcolm Dcosta
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  4. Ioannis Pavlidis
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Correspondence to Ioanna Semendeferi.

Appendix

Appendix

See the Table 7.

Table 7 List of cases per theme, with select films and readings for the MEPP course
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Semendeferi, I., Tsiamyrtzis, P., Dcosta, M. et al. Connecting Past with Present: A Mixed-Methods Science Ethics Course and its Evaluation. Sci Eng Ethics 22, 251–274 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11948-015-9626-4

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