INTEGRATING ETHICS INTO UNDERGRADUATE ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCE AND ECONOMICS EDUCATION

摘要

Good critical thinking about environmental issues requires students to identify both factual issues and ethical questions raised by environmental controversies; and separate the two because ethical issues are sometimes difficult to spot in what appears to be "value-neutral" scientific and economic descriptions of environmental problems. This paper explains the goals, methods, and lessons learned of a program, at the Pennsylvania State University, to enhance the critical thinking skills of undergraduate students in environmental sciences and economics as well as environmental engineering by teaching them to spot and evaluate ethical issues that arise in problem identification, evaluation, and solution design. The three-year program was funded with the expectation that the program's goals and lessons learned would be reviewed at the end of each year with corrections made in the program design based upon lessons learned. The paper explains how lessons learned in the first and second year led to changes in measurement instruments and content taught in the teaching modules. The paper will explain measurement instruments, results of testing, and revisions made in the program and the increased use of the teaching modules. The paper will also describe the creation and use of a faculty teaching module designed to allow other environmental science and economics faculty to use the teaching module at the Pennsylvania State University and other institutions. The paper will describe the increased use of the program across disciplines to test transferability of the teaching module.