Ethics education has been recognized as increasingly important to engineering over the past two decades, although disagreement exists concerning how ethics can and should be taught in the classroom. With the support from the National Science Foundation (NSF) Improving Undergraduate STEM Education (IUSE) program, a collaboration of investigators from the University of Connecticut, New Jersey Institute of Technology, University of Pittsburgh, and Rowan University are conducting a mixed-methods project investigating how game-based or playful learning with strongly situated components can influence first-year engineering students’ ethical knowledge, awareness, and decision making. We have conducted preliminary analyses of first-year students’ ethical reasoning and knowledge using the Defining Issues Test 2 (DIT-2), Engineering Ethics Reasoning Instrument (EERI), and concept map assessment to characterize where students “are at” when they come to college, the results of which can be found in past ASEE publications. Additionally, we have developed a suite of ethics-driven classroom games that have been implemented and evaluated across three universities, engaging over 400 first-year engineering students. Now in its third year, we are modifying and (re)designing two of the game- based ethics interventions to (1) more accurately align with the ethical dilemmas in the EERI, (2) allow for more flexibility in modality of how the games are distributed to faculty and students, and (3) provide more variety in terms of the contexts of ethical dilemmas as well as types of dilemmas. As part of the continued development of the game-based ethical interventions, we are piloting a new assessment tool specific for playful learning in engineering ethics and aimed at measuring students ethical reasoning and thought process after they have played the game(s).
The past year has provided insight into the potential limitations of the existing methods for measuring changes in ethical reasoning in students, as well as compared changes between first year and senior students. The last year has highlighted the situated or contextual nature of much of the ethical decision making that students do and incorporated both qualitative and quantitative methods. Further results from this investigation will provide the engineering education community with a set of impactful and research-based playful learning pedagogy and assessment that will help students confront social and ethical dilemmas in their professional lives.
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The herpetological legacy of Jacob Green and the nomenclature of some North American lizards and salamanders
Jacob Green was born in 1790 to a prominent New Jersey family of scholars and theologians. He taught at the College of New Jersey (now Princeton University) from 1818 to 1822 before co-founding Jefferson Medical College (now Thomas Jefferson University) in 1825, where he taught Chemistry until his death in 1841. Between 1818 and 1831, he published a series of nine papers on lizards, salamanders, and snakes, authoring the original description of several well-known species of salamanders from the eastern United States. Many of his names are ambiguous; some have been adjudicated by the ICZN, while others are currently treated as nomina dubia. Here, we review all of Green’s publications, report on newly re-discovered or re-interpreted material from several major natural history collections, and resolve most if not all remaining issues through a series of taxonomic actions. In particular, we first designate a neotype for Salamandra nigra Green, 1818. We then place S. sinciput-albida Green, 1818 and S. frontalis Gray in Cuvier, 1831 in synonymy with S. scutata Temminck in Temminck & Schlegel, 1838 and invoke Reversal of Precedence under Article 23.9 to designate them nomina oblita. We also designate a lectotype for S. bislineata Green, 1818. Finally, we resurrect the name S. fusca Green, 1818 as the valid name for the species Desmognathus fuscus, assuming priority over Triturus fuscus Rafinesque, 1820, designating S. fusca Laurenti, 1768 a nomen oblitum, and placing S. nigra Green, 1818 in synonymy. While Green’s herpetological legacy is not as expansive as that of some of his successors such as Holbrook, he is nonetheless a foundational early worker in salamanders, having described some of the most-studied species in the world.
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- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10250792
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Zootaxa
- Volume:
- 4838
- Issue:
- 2
- ISSN:
- 1175-5326
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 221 to 247
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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null (Ed.)Yu Kawamata was born in Japan in 1988, and he completed his undergraduate education at Kyoto University. He obtained his master’s degree and his Ph.D. at the same university under the supervision of Professor Keiji Maruoka, and he undertook a short-term internship at The Scripps Research Institute working on natural product synthesis with Professor Phil S. Baran. Upon completion of his doctoral studies, he returned to the Baran laboratory as a research associate and currently is pursuing his postdoctoral studies on organic electrochemistry.Phil S. Baran was born in New Jersey in 1977 and completed his undergraduate education at New York University in 1997. After earning his Ph.D. at The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI) in 2001, he pursued postdoctoral studies at Harvard University until 2003, at which point he returned to TSRI to begin his independent career. He was promoted to the rank of professor in 2008 and is currently the Darlene Shiley Professor of Chemistry. The mission of his laboratory is to educate students at the intersection of fundamental organic chemistry and translational science.more » « less
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Abstract In 1949–1951, ecologist Robert H. Whittaker sampled plant community composition at 470 sites in the Siskiyou Mountains (Oregon and California; also known as Klamath or Klamath‐Siskiyou Mountains). His primary goal was to develop methods to quantify plant community variation across environmental gradients, following on his seminal work challenging communities as discrete entities. He selected the Siskiyous because of their diverse and endemic‐rich flora, which he attributed to geological complexity and an ancient stable climate. He chose sites to span gradients of topography, elevation, geologic substrate, and distance from the coast. He used the frequencies of indicator species in his data to assign sampling locations to positions on the topographic gradient, nested within the elevational and substrate gradients. He originated in this study the concept of diversity partitioning, in which gamma diversity (species richness of a community) equals alpha diversity (species richness in homogeneous sites) times beta diversity (species turnover among sites along gradients). Diversity partitioning subsequently became highly influential and new developments on it continue. Whittaker published his Siskiyou work covering paleohistory, biogeography, floristics, vegetation, gradient analysis, and diversity partitioning in
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.11646/zootaxa.4838.2.4
