Institutions create their own internal cultures, including the culture of ethics that pervades scientific research, academic policy, and administrative philosophy. This paper addresses some of the issues involved in institutional enhancement of its culture of research ethics, focused on individual empowerment and strategies that individuals can use to initiate institutional change.In the pursuit of our core activities in higher education -teaching, research, and serviceethical infractions are antithetical to our values. However, reports of ethical infractions in higher education can be seen frequently in, for example, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and the NIH Guide to Grants and Contracts.The authors, representing a variety of academic disciplines, met during the 10th annual conference on Teaching Survival Skills and Ethics, sponsored by the University of
Education in the responsible conduct of research (RCR) in the United States has evolved over the past decade from targeting trainees to including educational efforts aimed at faculty and staff. In addition RCR education has become more focused as federal agencies have moved to recommend specific content and to mandate education in certain areas. RCR education has therefore become a research-compliance issue necessitating the development of policies and the commitment of resources to develop or expand systems for educating faculty and staff and for assuring compliance. These changes implied the need to develop a program evaluation model that could be applied to institutional RCR education programs, which were expected to differ from traditional academic credit-bearing courses targeting trainees. Information gleaned from the examination of corporate compliance models was analyzed in order to create a program evaluation module that could be used to document and assess educational programs focused on teaching RCR. A programmed series of questions for each of the nine RCR content areas identified by the United States Office of Research Integrity was created based on a performance-monitoring evaluation model. The questions focus on educational goals, resources provided to support the educational efforts, educational content, content delivery, educational outcomes, compliance requirements and feedback. Answers collected in response to the questions could be used to both document and continually improve the quality of RCR educational programs through on-going formative assessment and feedback.
A content analysis was performed on a random sample (N = 168) of 25% of the articles published in the Journal of Veterinary Medical Education (JVME) per year from 1974 through 2004. Over time, there were increased numbers of authors per paper, more cross-institutional collaborations, greater prevalence of references or endnotes, and lengthier articles, which could indicate a trend toward publications describing more complex or complete work. The number of first authors that could be identified as female was greatest for the most recent time period studied (2000-2004). Two different categorization schemes were created to assess the content of the publications. The first categorization scheme identified the most frequently published topics as admissions, descriptions of courses, the effect of changing teaching methods, issues facing the profession, and examples of uses of technology. The second categorization scheme identified the subset of articles that described medical education research on the basis of the purpose of the research, which represented only 14% of the sample articles (24 of 168). Of that group, only three of 24, or 12%, represented studies based on a firm conceptual framework that could be confirmed or refuted by the study's results. The results indicate that JVME is meeting its broadly based mission and that publications in the veterinary medical education literature have features common to publications in medicine and medical education.
Since Integrity in Scientific Research: Creating an Environment That Promotes Responsible Conduct was released in 2001, there has been increased interest in evaluating programs designed to foster the responsible conduct of research (RCR). The field of program evaluation is designed to determine the worth or value of programs and can serve as a resource for institutions interested in evaluating their RCR programs. This article provides a very brief overview of program evaluation, demonstrates how it can be applied to RCR, and provides key reference information. Evaluating RCR programs can promote institutional accountability for the resources that are used in supporting those programs.
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