Students met for a single two-hour session once a week during a nine-week term. Each class session
focused on a specific topic area. The course was team taught with each class session lead by one faculty
discussion leader. Several members of our faculty teaching team were present at all times to answer
questions and engage in discussion with students.1 The course director was present for all sessions to
provide continuity. An essential component to team teaching in this manner was for course faculty to
spend considerable time working together on issues of research ethics, a process described in the next
section.
Students were assigned readings in advance of each class session to help them become familiar with
regulations, conventions, and responsibilities within the topic areas. We expected students to use this
information in discussion when they came to class. Although we began by thinking that some formal
lectures would be helpful for students, we changed our minds after weighing the result of both the
students’ comments and our own assessment of what the students had learned the first time we offered
the course. Our experience leads us to be skeptical of using valuable class time for the presentation of
material that the students can incorporate through readings. We do, however, believe in creating class
discussions that require students to draw upon this information whenever possible. What we found was
similar to what has been suggested by other teachers of ethics: that passive learning, simply listening to
lectures, does not adequately equip students to use their own judgment in analyzing real-life situations.2
We recommend that the first session of the class be used to present a framework for dealing with
ethical problems. The first time we offered the course, we did not have such a session. This was partly
because we were concerned that science students would be turned off by a blunt discussion of ethics. We
hoped instead that students would recognize the ethical theory behind our discussion of the cases. This
did not work. The students did not adequately develop a systematic approach to ethics. The second time
we offered the course, we presented a session on ethical framework at the start, and we were able to
relate all further discussion back to the material presented in the first session; this was a far more
successful approach.
Real cases, documented in newspaper and other articles, were an important source of course materials.
We believe that real cases bring a depth and reality to the discussions. We thus began our course with the
discussion of a real and very complex case, the Imanishi-Kari/Baltimore case. In addition, we used a
combination of case scenarios and literature to focus on issues that could less easily be deciphered from
the real life situations. The play A Stampede of Zebras by R. G. Martin, for example, was very
important in helping us present the topic of interpersonal interaction in the laboratory.
As cases highlight what has gone wrong, we were concerned that the use of case material might leave
students with a negative view of the field they are entering. But, in our experience, students appreciated
the use of case material, particularly when cases were well chosen so that the situations were familiar and
believable. Rather than making students uncomfortable with their chosen field, the use of cases reassured
them that they were not alone with, and unusual in, concerns that they themselves had recognized or
confronted.
To reinforce the case analysis method, we included one session for student presentations. During this
session students presented and analyzed cases of interest to them. We believe that student presentations
are a central component to an ethics course. Although we had the students do these analyses through
verbal presentations, we would have preferred to also include written presentations. In fact, we feel that
written assignments on a weekly basis would be optimal. Such a course structure would require,
however, that a course in research ethics have more institutional support than we were able to muster.
Since, as we describe in Section 6, recruitment of students was a problem for us, we intentionally kept
the course requirements to a minimum.