Development and Impact Assessment of an Interactive Online System for Computing Ethics Education

This project aims to serve the national interest by advancing our understanding of how to provide effective ethics education for computing students. Computing systems and algorithms are used in all aspects of the modern world, including healthcare, governance, social media, defense, and business. Recent years have witnessed, a steady succession of ethical failures in the development and application of computer technology. Computing ethics courses have emerged, but as important as these courses are, ethics-education researchers have been increasingly aware of the drawbacks of relying on a single course to instill ethical behavior in students. This project will study the effectiveness of embedding ethics instruction throughout the computing curriculum. The Platform for Ethics and Responsible Computing Education (PEaRCE) will be developed and used to provide realistic interactive scenarios that highlight how to apply ethics in the creation and development of computing systems. The development methodology for this project will involve co-designing a wide variety of work-situation scenarios for the PEaRCE platform, in collaboration with computing educators, to fit the topics of their courses. A variety of features in the platform as well as curricular activities will be developed to accompany the PEaRCE simulations, to support educators who may have little or no background in ethics education. The research methodology, and main goal of this project, will be to analyze the impact of PEaRCE on students’ ethical awareness as they progress in their use of the platform. Research studies will involve about 1,000 undergraduate and graduate computing students at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and their instructors, and later in computing courses taught at New York University. The NSF IUSE: EDU Program supports research and development projects to improve the effectiveness of STEM education for all students. Through the Engaged Student Learning track, the program supports the creation, exploration, and implementation of promising practices and tools. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.