Biomedical Engineering Reference
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the NOT-OD-10-019 stipulates that “(a)ctive involvement in the issues of . . . research
should occur throughout a scientist's career” there is no information or even sugges-
tion that this involvement should be flexible, adaptive, grow, and/or change in any
way over time. There are no requirements—nor are there incentives or guidelines—to
either develop or document the capacity to reliably train others in the finely grained
ethical reasoning that would meaningfully afford the type and level of expertise
required. The only difference between “new” and “practicing” scientists in this para-
digm is
time
, not training in ethics or experience with ethical challenges.
THE MASTERY RUBRIC FOR ETHICAL REASONING (MR-ER)
Therefore, we (re-)introduce a paradigm—the Mastery Rubric (MR)—that focuses
on a learnable, improvable skillset in
ethical reasoning
(MR-ER; Tractenberg and
FitzGerald 2012), as directly applicable to the evaluation, training, and fortifica-
tion of multidisciplinary professionals who would constitute the working groups to
address NELSI of neuro S/T in NSID. As shown in Table 17.1, this paradigm explic-
itly has an inherent developmental trajectory: performance of the ethical reasoning
skills and steps are described in a flexible manner so that any experiences can be
reflected upon in order to demonstrate either the need for additional development of
a given reasoning skill, or the actual level at which that particular ethical reasoning
element is possessed.
Our new paradigm does not replace formal curricula in S/T ethics (what we have
referred to as
In-STEPS
:
In
tegrative
S
cience,
T
ech nology,
E
thics and
P
olicy
S
tudies;
Giordano 2012b; Anderson and Giordano 2013), but it challenges almost every fea-
ture of regnant forms of ethics training and uses performance portfolios to capture
learning and development of participants. In this way, it can be seen as a valuable
component (e.g., as a progression metric and/or capstone) of the type of applied eth-
ics curriculum that has recently been called for to meet multifocal opportunities
and challenges of neuro S/T (Nuffield Report 2013), as well as an evaluative and/or
recurrency training tool that can be used to assess/expand the knowledge and skills
of upper-level professionals. In short, the MR-ER outlines a career-spanning train-
ing trajectory emphasizing ethical reasoning (Tractenberg and FitzGerald 2012). The
MR-ER paradigm assesses (and directs) the acquisition and exercise of metacogni-
tive reasoning skills that will be used to address and discern decisions (and decision
processes) that must be made about specific scenarios, while also engaging the par-
ticipant to self-assess their formal reasoning skills. These metacognitive skills can
be taught and practiced with ethical materials and can be used across other domains
once developed (Tractenberg and FitzGerald, in preparation).
Herein, we (re-)present the MR-ER more broadly as a developmental (and
assessment) tool that is both task and temporally agile and that supports knowl-
edge bases and experiential and ethical competencies that are wholly aligned
with and constituent to our TASKER approach to HISTORY (Figure 17.2). This
offers a unique form of developmental and dynamic ethics training and evalua-
tion that we conceptualize as targeting a set of six learnable, improvable types
of knowledge, skills, or abilities (KSAs) that together make up ethical reasoning.
These are: prerequisite knowledge; recognizing an ethical issue; identification of
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