The Emergence of Student Models from an Analysis of Ethical Decision Making in a Scenario-Based Learning Environment

Abstract

Too often, professional ethics issues are trivialized in software engineering education. To begin to remedy this situation, we have built two interactive, adaptive learning scenarios that place students in the role of a software project manager confronting many critical project decisions, each with an ethical dimension. As students move through a scenario, making and justifying their decisions, their behaviour can be monitored and used both to adapt the scenario to each student as they proceed, and in post hoc analysis to identify different classes of ethical behaviour. In this paper we discuss five different classes of student behaviour that emerged from the analysis of protocols collected during the use of these scenarios in a third year undergraduate software engineering class. We speculate that the existence of these general student models can be used in several ways to further enhance the learning of ethics

We would like to express our gratitude to John Cooke and Judy Thomson who helped with the experiment, and acknowledge the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada for funding this research. We would also like to thank the Basser Department of Computer Science at the University of Sydney, Australia, who acted as sabbatical hosts for Gord McCalla during the time this paper was written.