Rosa Lynn Pinkus

Introducing PETE: computer support for teaching ethics

In this paper, we discuss the challenges in providing computer support for teaching professional ethics using a case-based approach. We describe our tutoring software, PETE, which helps students prepare cases for class discussion. PETE enables students to practice methods of moral reasoning. It also encourages them to compare their work to a range of other peer responses. We discuss how the program could incorporate AI techniques and how to evaluate its effectiveness.

Hospital guidelines for deciding about life-sustaining treatment: dealing with health limbö

The decision to withhold life-sustaining treatment from hopelessly ill patients is fraught with ethical dilemmas and legal uncertainties. Although there are extensive published commentaries on the subject and the life is gradually becoming clearer, care-givers often need concrete guidance when confronted with actual cases. Hospital ethics committees can assist care-givers, patients, and families in resolving these dilemmas, but the committees also need some specific guidance to be relatively consistent. Therefore, the Ethics and Hunan Rights Committee of Presbyterian-University Hospital, one of the University Health Center Hospitals in Pittsburgh, has developed guidelines for deciding about life-sustaining treatment.

Evolution of clinical ethics teaching at the University of Pittsburgh

&NA; The authors explain that several years of effort, by many faculty from a variety of disciplines, were required to expand medical ethics teaching at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine beyond the preclinical years. Since 1986, faculty associated with the schools Center for Medical Ethics have begun a comprehensive ethics teaching program for all four years and the residency period; they also are attempting to develop an ethics consultation service. The authors describe the program, its promise and plans, and the significant difficulties involved in establishing and maintaining it, not only problems of long‐term funding but of the uninformed and negative attitudes of some students and faculty toward ethics teaching, especially in the clinical setting. Also discussed are the pros and cons of using cases in ethics teaching and the programs approaches to evaluation and to training clinical faculty in clinical ethics issues.

The Consortium Ethics Program: An approach to establishing a permanent regional ethics network

This paper describes the first three-year experience of the Consortium Ethics Program (CEP-1) of the University of Pittsburgh Center for Medical Ethics, and also outlines plans for the second three-year phase (CEP-2) of this experiment in continuing ethics education. In existence since 1990, the CEP has the primary goal of creating a cost-effective, permanent ethics resource network, by utilizing the educational resources of a university bioethics center and the practical expertise of a regional hospital council. The CEPs conception and specific components stem from recognition of the need to make each hospital a major focus of educational efforts, and to provide academic support for the in-house activities of the representatives from each institution.

The Role of Professional Knowledge in Case-Based Reasoning in Practical Ethics

Abstract The use of case-based reasoning in teaching professional ethics has come of age. The fields of medicine, engineering, and business all have incorporated ethics case studies into leading textbooks and journal articles, as well as undergraduate and graduate professional ethics courses. The most recent guidelines from the National Institutes of Health recognize case studies and face-to-face discussion as best practices to be included in training programs for the Responsible Conduct of Research. While there is a general consensus that case studies play a central role in the teaching of professional ethics, there is still much to be learned regarding how professionals learn ethics using case-based reasoning. Cases take many forms, and there are a variety of ways to write them and use them in teaching. This paper reports the results of a study designed to investigate one of the issues in teaching case-based ethics: the role of one’s professional knowledge in learning methods of moral reasoning. Using a novel assessment instrument, we compared case studies written and analyzed by three groups of students whom we classified as: (1) Experts in a research domain in bioengineering. (2) Novices in a research domain in bioengineering. (3) The non-research group—students using an engineering domain in which they were interested but had no in-depth knowledge. This study demonstrates that a student’s level of understanding of a professional knowledge domain plays a significant role in learning moral reasoning skills.

Superman meets don Quixote: Stereotypes in clinical medicine

Long-established stereotypes tend to dominate the perceptions physicians have of the philosophers and other humanists who serve as medical ethicists. They also alter the views humanists have of physicians, and those that the public have of both. These stereotypes are a formidable barrier to effective working relationships between the two groups of professionals, as well as to public understanding of medical ethics issues. To achieve a better working relationships and to foster more realistic understanding, it is important that the humanists step out of their academic settings, for a time, and become part of the clinical service.

Validity and Reliability of an Instrument for Assessing Case Analyses in Bioengineering Ethics Education

Assessment in ethics education faces a challenge. From the perspectives of teachers, students, and third-party evaluators like the Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology and the National Institutes of Health, assessment of student performance is essential. Because of the complexity of ethical case analysis, however, it is difficult to formulate assessment criteria, and to recognize when students fulfill them. Improvement in students’ moral reasoning skills can serve as the focus of assessment. In previous work, Rosa Lynn Pinkus and Claire Gloeckner developed a novel instrument for assessing moral reasoning skills in bioengineering ethics. In this paper, we compare that approach to existing assessment techniques, and evaluate its validity and reliability. We find that it is sensitive to knowledge gain and that independent coders agree on how to apply it.