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Ethics Incognito: Detecting Ethically Relevant Courses Across Curricula in Higher Education

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Abstract

As colleges and universities seek to invigorate ethics education, they need methods to identify where and describe how ethics is already present across their curricula. Meeting this need is complicated by the fact that much ethics education occurs in courses not explicitly focused on ethics or morality. In this paper, we review recent methodological advances before presenting a new Ethics Course Identification Tool (ECIT) that combines application of an expert-derived weighted dictionary and natural language processing methods to identify ethics-related courses based on their titles and course catalog descriptions, even when the terms “ethic” or “moral” are not present. Two studies, the second a pre-registered replication, revealed considerable interrater reliability among experts in ethics education regarding the ethical relevance of courses. Critically, both studies revealed strong correlations between expert judgments and ECIT scores. This empirical evidence points to a shared understanding of ethics education among experts, and it supports the valid use of the ECIT to rapidly and reliably identify ethics-related courses. Based on these findings, we propose that the ECIT can be used both to advance research on trends in ethics education and to help target interventions to improve ethics education at colleges and universities.

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Acknowledgements

We are grateful to Ka Ya Lee and Drew Chambers for their careful review of the manuscript and for their valuable insight. We also extend our thanks to Cara Biasucci and Deni Elliott for assistance in recruiting participants. Their contributions were invaluable to the success of this project. This work was generously supported by the Edmond J. Safra Philanthropic Foundation and Eugene P. Beard.

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  1. All authors contributed equally to the article.

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  1. Edmond & Lily Safra Center for Ethics, Harvard University, 124 Mt. Auburn Street, Suite 520-North, MA, 02138, Cambridge, USA

    Martino Ongis, David Kidd & Jess Miner

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  1. Martino Ongis
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  2. David Kidd
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  3. Jess Miner
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Correspondence to Martino Ongis or David Kidd.

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Ongis, M., Kidd, D. & Miner, J. Ethics Incognito: Detecting Ethically Relevant Courses Across Curricula in Higher Education. J Acad Ethics (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10805-023-09482-8

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