Adaptation, Piloting, and Validation of a Test of Ethical Sensitivity in Teaching

• In Event: Professional Ethics for Future Teachers: Toward a Common Vision

Abstract

Purpose
This paper presents the elaboration, piloting and validation of a psychometric assessment of ethical sensitivity in teaching.

Perspectives
Based on a similar test of ethical sensitivity originally developed in the field of dentistry (Bebeau, Rest & Yamoor, 1985), both the original and adapted versions take as a conceptual framework Rest’s Four Component Model of Moral Functioning. To ensure that the Test of Ethical Sensitivity in Teaching (TEST), as we have named it, elicits the Restian construct of ethical sensitivity well (You, Maeda, & Bebeau, 2011), the assessment’s situational design presents participants with a scenario and, in response to a series of probe questions, participants must themselves identify the ethical issues at stake.

Methods and Data Sources
Initial iterations of the scenarios drew on the results of previous qualitative analyses of teachers’ perceptions of the most frequently recurrent ethical issues arising in practice (Barrett, Casey, Visser, & Headley, 2012) and items in codes of teacher ethics (Authors, 2016). The dominant ethical themes in the test scenarios were: the duty to report, teachers’ right to a private life, discretion in handling personal information, and professional autonomy. Once drafted, the scenarios were vetted in collaboration with teacher-partners in three countries (the United States, Canada and the Netherlands). Professional relevance, realism—both in terms of the language used and the situations depicted—were checked for and input on scoring criteria was sought in terms of three main content categories: ethical obligations, ethically relevant circumstantial factors and action impacts. Next, four-minute long animated video versions of the refined scenarios were produced and a web-based test portal was set up for the purposes of the pilot phase. The aims of the pilot phase, which involved approximately 50 education students at various program stages and early career teachers, were to refine the scoring system and probe questions, check for inter-rater reliability, and obtain evidence of construct validity.

Results
Subsequent to the pilot phase and in light of its findings, the number of scenarios in the TEST was narrowed down from four to two and large scale recruitment efforts were undertaken to obtain, for the sake of validating the instrument, response sets from a total of 250 participants in six distinct groups of known varying ethical sensitivity: beginning education students (n=50), finishing education students (n=50), early career teachers (n=50), mid- to late-career teachers (n=50), teacher educators (n=25) and exceptionally committed teaching professionals (n=25). The latter were recognized as such by having been awarded a national or regional prize for excellence in teaching. At the time of writing this proposal, we are nearing the end of recruitment for the validation phase.

Scholarly significance
By the time of the conference, we will be in a position to present the results of the Rasch analysis aimed at determining the instrument’s construct validity and report the findings of the planned exploration of correlations between ethical sensitivity score and such factors as reasoning ability, previous educational background, area of teaching specialization, and religiosity.

Authors

• Bruce Maxwell, Université de Montréal

• Nicolas Jordan Tanchuk, Independent Scholar

• Helen Joanna Boon, James Cook University - Australia