A Little Goes a Long Way: Adapting an Ethics Training Program to Work for Smaller Universities

The present project modified an existing ethics intervention aimed at graduate students, which had previously been evaluated and determined to be effective. The existing program was modified to shorten it from a 2 full-day training to a 1 full-day training. The effectiveness of the modified training program was evaluated using multiple dependent measures: perceptions of ethical dilemmas, ethical decision making and the using of cognitive strategies for ethical decision making, and reactions to the training. The results of the present study indicated that there were significant differences from pretraining to posttraining on measures of perceptions of ethical problems and markers of the cognitive processes involved in ethical decision making, including a focus on the ethical elements of the problem, and overall decision ethicality. Finally, participants reacted favorably to the program. Implications of these results are discussed.

Assessing the Impact of the Giving Voice to Values Program in Accounting Ethics Education

This paper assesses the impact of the Giving Voice to Values (GVV) program. The GVV program takes a very different approach to ethics education and shifts the focus from the traditional why actions are unethical to how one can effectively resolve ethical conflict. The GVV program encourages reflection on potential actions and reactions through practice with voicing one’s values. We chose to implement this program in an advanced financial accounting course and encouraged our students to voice their values through scripted role-plays. After implementing this program and empirically assessing the impact of the ethics intervention, we find that students are more likely to speak up and confront unethical actions by voicing their values to internal management, the CFO, and company hotlines after completing the module. While not a primary focus of the study, the intervention also appears to have increased the students’ ability to recognize and increase their sensitivity to ethical issues.

ETHICAL DIMENSIONS WHEN INTERVENING IN CLASSROOM RESEARCH

There is an increasing amount of educational research that aims at intervening in classroom teaching and learning practices, partly as a response to “what works” in education. However, few researchers ask the fundamental question of who actually “owns” the interventions, and not the least which ethical dimensions arise from intervening in classrooms. The present research investigates these two questions and relates them to the role of the researcher in formative intervention research, and by relating ethical dimensions to ethics of principles, consequences, relations and virtues. It suggests that interventionist researchers need to develop their reflexive sensitivity, both epistemologically and methodologically when they conduct formative interventions in classrooms, and that the idea of intervening requires different responses depending on the type of ethics that is applied. Interventionist researchers need to be more humble, more open to new ideas and changes in their original plans, and more able to share their contributions with the field of education compared to descriptive research designs. Also, they need to question the very idea of intervening in classrooms, legitimize it and reflect on it with ethical dimensions in mind. Key words: formative interventions, research ethics, intervention research, professional development.