Most of today's students are skilled in instant messaging, Web browsing, online games, and blogs. These have become part of the social landscape and have changed how we learn and where we learn. The question becomes how to harness the attractiveness and ubiquity of electronic venues toward the goal of teaching neuroscience. At the Rice University Center for Technology in Teaching and Learning, a central focus is the creation of innovative materials that appeal to middle school students. A recent project was undertaken through a Science Education Drug Abuse Partnership Award (R25 DA15063) from the National Institute on Drug Abuse to inform adolescents about the neurobiology of substance abuse and the current research dealing with a class of drugs known as club drugs. Problem-based learning, multimedia pedagogy, and the National Science Content Standards were integrated to produce The Reconstructors™, an episodic series available via the World Wide Web at http://reconstructors.rice.edu . A field test of students from five schools assessed the retention of content after “playing” The Reconstructors™ series titled Nothing to Rave About. Gain scores indicated that middle school students' knowledge about club drugs and the basic neuroscience concepts that explain their effects improved significantly.
A barrier to the development and refinement of ethics education in and across health professional schools is that there is not an agreed upon instrument or method for assessment in ethics education. The most widely used ethics education assessment instrument is the Defining Issues Test (DIT) I & II. This instrument is not specific to the health professions. But it has been modified for use in, and influenced the development of other instruments in, the health professions. The DIT contains certain philosophical assumptions ("Kohlbergian" or "neo-Kohlbergian") that have been criticized in recent years. It is also expensive for large institutions to use. The purpose of this article is to offer a rubric-which the authors have named the Health Professional Ethics Rubric-for the assessment of several learning outcomes related to ethics education in health science centers. This rubric is not open to the same philosophical critiques as the DIT and other such instruments. This rubric is also practical to use. This article includes the rubric being advocated, which was developed by faculty and administrators at a large academic health science center as a part of a campus-wide ethics education initiative. The process of developing the rubric is described, as well as certain limitations and plans for revision.
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