Ethical Review of Discipline-Based Education Research: Ensuring Fair Treatment for All

As universities grapple with funding cuts and heightened social and political pressure, the emerging field of Discipline-Based Education Research (DBER) aims to improve student learning outcomes through experimental instruction. While using instruction as an experiment, with hypotheses and experimental tests, DBER research may affect student learning in unintended ways for students involved in these classes. To address this concern, I impose ethical frameworks, namely contractualism, to better understand how the values of each stakeholder, students enrolled in experimental courses and researchers using these courses to test hypotheses, interact. I also identify potential misalignments. Following a contractual ethical framework, I suggest five practices that should be adopted to best meet the values of all stakeholders: (1) DBER experiments should inform student test subjects that they are taking an experimental class prior to enrolling; (2) DBER experiments should provide “opt out clauses” that fully remove students from experimental treatments; (3) DBER experiments should include criteria for ending experimental treatments when they adversely affect learning; (4) DBER experiments should provide adequate compensation when treatment causes harm to student test subjects; and (5) DBER researches should not administer any instruction in which they assisted in the development of the experimental design.