The Creation And Validation Of Measures For Ethics In Cross Disciplinary Student Teams

This paper is a progress report on the ethics component of a collaborative effort involving teambased project programs at four universities: the IPRO program at Illinois Institute of Technology, the Integrated Product Development program at Lehigh, the Enterprise program Michigan Tech, and the EPICS program at Purdue. The ethics component has the following specific goals: 1) development and validation of instruments to measure ethical proficiency of undergraduate students on multidisciplinary teams; and 2) identifying and developing best practices for creating ethical awareness of the student. Two ethics measures have been developed at IIT and pilot studies started: one presenting ethical situation vignettes with multiple choice answers based on a previously validated method; the other to study ethical climate. These measures have been revised based on initial small pilot studies and are presently being administered at multiple sites. Introduction Many business organizations have been changing their approach to problem solving from a structure with predominantly mono-disciplinary interaction sequentially with each other to multidisciplinary cross-functional teams who work longitudinally from idea creation to client satisfaction 1 . Cross disciplinary teams consist of members with different functional experiences and abilities, and will likely come from different departments within the organization. This shift to multidisciplinary teams has created a need for everyone to develop new skills such as communication with fellow members from other disciplines and an awareness of a broader set of ethical principles. Many organizations adopting the cross disciplinary team approach have found it necessary to provide focused employee training to enhance effective team functioning 2 . Recent work has been done to explore the dimensions that attribute to success in these teams. 3 As colleges and universities became aware of this change, many of them created new courses to better prepare their students to meet these new challenges. The undergraduate equivalent to cross disciplinary teams usually involves students in different academic majors; the extent of academic heterogeneity (e.g., different engineering specialties or including students in engineering, architecture, psychology, business, etc.) varies, and, with that variability, the challenges in teamwork processes – and recognizing ethical issues and determining how to deal with them. Ethical issues may concern the team process itself, or the decisions made about the problem the team is addressing. Faculty who teach the undergraduate team-based courses mentioned above have observed, anecdotally, that many students have a poor grasp of ethical issues that are relevant to their projects. 4 This is a progress report on the ethics component of a collaborative effort involving teambased project programs at four universities: the IPRO program at Illinois Institute of Technology, the Integrated Product Development program at Lehigh, the Enterprise program Michigan Tech, and the EPICS program at Purdue. The ethics component has the following specific goals: 1) development and validation of instruments to measure ethical P ge 15216.2 proficiency of undergraduate students on multidisciplinary teams; and 2) identifying and developing best practices for creating ethical awareness of the student. In two of our programs, students have been asked to reflect on their experience, specifically to “Identify the ethical issues relevant to your project group. Explain each of these issues, and how you dealt with them.” Many students said there were no ethical issues or provided overly simplistic descriptions of team functioning, for example, classroom participation: students would come to class and use their computes for non-project related matters; attendance: students would hardly come to class and leave early; and failing to complete deadlines: students would miss deadlines without contacting the group. It seems particularly difficult for students to identify ethical issues that involve how their design decisions may impact the ultimate end users. These reflective essays have provided a useful tool to begin the measurement of student understanding of ethical issues. However, we do not have a standardized, reliable and validated rubric for coding such responses, and they are time and expert-intensive to use widely as measures. When administered on-line, resistance from students is often substantial. For these reasons, our team set out to identify psychometrically sound tools with which to measure the ethical competencies desired among our undergraduate students. Other types of tests such as Defining Issues Test (DIT) 5 are generally considered by the educational research community to be inappropriate because the subject is low in fidelity and too far removed from the situation, meaning that the situations are unrealistic. Additionally, the DIT is cumbersome to interpret, requiring the assistance of a professional trained in interpreting the test results. So far, after consulting with other experts in ethics, we have not identified measures that we consider appropriate to use with our teams. Thus, we have been developing measures that we hope will be appropriate and useful to measure something like “ethical competence” at the undergraduate student level. We are doing this in order assess our varied educational programs, and to identify the best practices in different contexts. This report focuses on measures being developed at IIT, using the InterProfessional (IPRO) program as our primary partner. Our partner program at Purdue, the Engineering Practice in Community Service (EPICS) is also developing an ethics curriculum and measures; they are reporting elsewhere on their work. Measures Under Development and Preliminary Results Ethical decision-making (EDM) Our approach is based on that used by Mumford 6 to explore ethical decision making behavior in educational research. We are now in the process of supplementing the reflections with a quantitative measure involving situational judgments that provides plausible scenarios involving ethical issues followed by a set of viable responses; students select the response that most closely describes their likely course of action in the situation. By presenting situations that they realize might actually occur, rather than hypothetical ones, the tendency to select “socially desirable” answers is diminished. Concerns included research integrity, group interactions, professional etiquette, consequences for the team, and others. P ge 15216.3 Each question consists of an ethical dilemma followed by six possible responses. While all responses are plausible, two options are designed to capture highly ethical responses, two are moderately ethical response options, and two are marginally ethical responses to the dilemma. Students are instructed to select the two actions they would most likely make. Below is a sample question: You are the public relations director of a non-profit organization and works closely with other members of the leadership team. Your close friend is the treasurer of the group and has been displaying behaviors that reflect poorly on the team. She has often been late to meetings, plays on the computer instead of listening to the discussions at meetings and makes promises to members of the organization that the leadership team has not approved and would be unable to fulfill. You have brought these issues to the friend’s attention. After seeing no changes in behavior, you take the matter up with the president. At the next regularly scheduled meeting the president brings up all the issues you mentioned and some of her own that she has seen and calls for an immediate vote to terminate the treasurer without giving an opportunity to defend herself. You are shocked by this unilateral action. What would you do? Choose two of the following: a. Speak up in defense of the friend b. Vote against terminating but say nothing in public c. Vote for termination but say nothing in public d. Request a halt to the vote to discuss it further with the team e. Bring the issue up with the president after the meeting to voice concerns f. Abstain from voting, citing conflict of interest Two pilot studies have been conducted with this instrument. The first involved a qualitative interview about how students were responding to seven dilemmas such as the one described above. Respondents included 10 students who had previously completed one or two semesters of a team based project in the IPRO program. The goals were to learn their thought processes in answering the questions, identify possible ambiguities in wording, and gauge the believability of the dilemmas and appropriateness of the six possible “answers”. The feedback was used modify the questions. We then wrote three additional questions to broaden the scope of the survey. The second study used five of the 10 questions selected at random and were answered online by 54 self-selected student volunteers who had just finished a team project course. An analysis of difficulty and reliability estimate led to the removal of two scenarios; the remaining eight questions had a reliability of 0.71, which is considered psychometrically acceptable. Additional scenarios will be created and subjected to the same reliability screening. P ge 15216.4