Moral Perceptions of College Science Students

By Eric Nolan

A Thesis Submitted in Partial Fulfillment

of the Requirements for the Degree of 

Master of Arts in Sustainable Communities

Northern Arizona University

May 2017 

Approved:

Nora Timmerman, Ph.D., Chair

Sara Abercrombie, Ph.D.

Dana Zeidler, Ph.D.

ABSTRACT

This thesis argues that college-level science education is in need of explicit moral focuses centered on society’s use of scientific knowledge. Many benefits come with scientific advancements but unfortunately the misuse of scientific knowledge has led to planetary crises that should be a concern for all who inhabit the Earth (e.g., climate change). The teaching of the misuses of science is often left out of college science classrooms and the purpose of this thesis is to see what effect college science students’ education has had on their moral perception of these pressing issues. To evaluate how college science students morally perceive these global issues within their educational experiences, two focus group interviews were conducted and analyzed. Students converged on three themes when thinking of society’s misuse of science: 1) there is something wrong with the way science is communicated between science and non-science groups; 2) misusing science for private benefit is not right, and 3) it is important for people to comprehend sustainability along different scales of understanding and action. This thesis concludes that although to some extent students were familiar with moral features that stem from society’s misuse of science, they did not attribute their learning of those features from any of their required coursework within their programs of study.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to first thank Dr. Nora Timmerman, Dr. Sara Abercrombie, and Dr. Dana Zeidler for their unwavering support and guidance in the process of my thinking more deeply and fully about the material presented in this thesis. I hold a tremendous amount of gratitude and appreciation for your time and expertise.

I also want to recognize the time and effort that my colleague, Tallie Segel, dedicated in helping me collect and analyze data. Your help allowed me to pull everything together in a short period of time while you were also completing a thesis. 

I would not have been able to complete this masters program if it were not for the support of the Sustainable Communities Graduate Assistantship and Department of Biology Teacher Assistantship. I am beholden to Dr. Luis Fernandez, Ginger Christenson, Lara Dickson, Dr. Aaron Tabor, and Dr. Michael Minicozzi for allowing me the opportunities that you have. Thank you very much!

I especially want to acknowledge the care and comfort from my mom and sister that helped me get through some very tough times in the years it took me to complete this work. Thank you, thank you, thank you!

For my colleagues, friends, and special someones, you offered me something that no amount of success through my work can offer, love. Within our many conversations about the world and our lives, I am more able to understand the values of humility, compassion, empathy, and critical thinking. I would not have arrived at this point without you: Hope & Andrea Nolan (and the rest of the Nolan and Polinger families), Theresa Clark, Tara Boykin, Laquann Moore, Rashaan Allen, Kevin Ordean, Kim Curtis, Luis Fernandez, Rom Coles, Ginger Christenson, Janine Schipper, Paul Lenze, Sean Parson, Mike Chizhov, Lauren Cain, Noelle Poe, Leann Leiter, Jason and Valerie Minos (Aubrey too!), Katelin Eden, Lupita Salazar, Sara Leibold, Nichole Gregory, Jen Cody, Danika Danker, Liz Rivera, Brandon Pence, Emily Romano, Kristina Nova, Nic Beckett, Phil Ernst, Kelly Lutz, Kaitie Brakke, Kelly Kusumoto, Liz Bailey, Bill and Sherri Martinchuk, Brian and Mayte Guibardo, Barry and Cindy Clark, and Jessica Clark.

Chapter 1 Introduction

Science is something that has captivated my attention ever since I was a kid watching Star Trek: The Next Generation and the Discovery Channel with my dad. I found it fascinating how the laws of physics worked throughout the universe and how one seemingly small difference in a chemical bond can be the difference between life and death. In hindsight it seemed so innocent then that science could provide us with so many answers to so many questions we asked of the universe. Rather naively I believed this was all that science entailed.

Later in life I went back to school and received a bachelor of science degree at Northern Arizona University (NAU) for Environmental Sciences. This education gave me a conceptual and technical understanding of how our planet Earth operates by looking at the interaction of subjects like chemistry, biology, geology, ecology, and hydrology. As fascinating as that experience was for me, it was not until my time during my masters program that I began to question and think more deeply about the harm and destruction that can come from misusing science. Throughout my coursework and moments of deeply reflective discussion within my Sustainable Communities masters program, I began to realize that the education I received as an undergraduate rarely involved conversations centered around the moral dimensions of science. When I mention the moral dimensions of science I am referring to the acknowledgement that science is not a benign field of altruistic intentions as I once believed as a kid. 

During my time as a graduate student, I became more aware that the uses of science were not as idealistic as I had once thought. I began more deeply recognizing that the world I live in is a technologically-advanced, yet increasingly destructive, global consumerist society (Bowers, 2001; Greenwood, 2010; Illich, 1971; Orr, 2004; Polanyi, 1944). Given the vast amounts of social, ecological, and planetary harm this type of societal operation makes possible, I see a moral issue at hand that needs to be discussed. I think this discussion needs to take place in spaces where science education is taught so that younger audiences grow into adulthood with an understanding that responsible decisions are needed on matters pertaining to society’s use of science. I believe that responsible decision-making, in part, is constructed by our morality. I want to investigate this need by examining how college science students perceive the moral dimensions surrounding society’s use of science. This need became the motivation for writing this thesis.

For the sake of clarity, I am making a distinction between the terms moral and ethic, as the former is the focus of this study. A moral is concerned with the principles and values of an individual that are particular toward an understanding of what is right and wrong, good and bad, just and unjust. An ethic, on the other hand, stems from the Latin root ‘ethos’ meaning characteristics that are particular for a given group of what is right and wrong. An individual will always have the free will to make personally contextualized decisions of what is right and wrong, but because of the social nature of human behavior, an individual will also be persuaded to conform to social norms and standards that are dependent on the values and understandings shared by a collective group. This distinction should help clarify any ambiguity between the two terms as they are used throughout this thesis as my emphasis is on the moral perception, or individual perception of right and wrong, from each student as they went through their educational experience at a major university.

1.1 Problem statement

The problem I am addressing is a lack of moral teaching in science education. I will begin addressing the problem I see by discussing the role of science turning from an intellectual curiosity to a technocratic dominance of society’s operation followed by a subsection addressing the planetary crises that this society has created. Then I will proceed to discuss how traditional science education has helped exacerbate the problem by not having a moral and ethical focus that can properly acknowledge the challenges that come with technologically elite societies disrupting planetary life-sustaining systems. I will conclude the problem statement by addressing the lack of moral and ethical focus in science education.

1.1.a Science: Society’s means to an end

It can be argued that the scale to which we are now capable of transforming the entire planet started with the advent of the scientific revolution, a movement that originally propelled a new hope for humankind as it offered us new ways of understanding the universe, and understanding ourselves. However, with new scientific discoveries came new ways for us to transform the way we live our lives that have proven both beneficial and ruinous (Tarnas, 1993). Some of the benefits include great milestones like extending the average human lifespan well into 70 and 80 years of age, establishing electrical networks allowing millions of people to have heat and light at the flip of a switch, and drastically reducing the time needed to traverse large areas of land with the invention of the combustible engine. Some of the ruins, however, include altering the planet’s climate to the point of drastically disturbing millions of years of established ecosystems, dumping pollutants by the ton into oceans, rivers, and the atmosphere, and potentially initiating a life extinction event that could rival that of the dinosaurs. The disturbing outcomes and consequences from a technologically- and scientifically-advanced society are summed up well by Tarnas when he says, “…the temperament allied with science and technological development had lauded [hu]man’s separation from nature” (p. 377). I find this to be a powerful statement because we are still seeing this separation taking place even though that was written over 20 years ago. This separation has been amplified since the birth of the industrial age and the corporatization of natural resources which is fairly visible in almost all aspects of modern civilization. 

The use of science has deviated from a path of curious inquisition and discovery to a path that is now greatly commodified and privatized. Illich (1971) discusses how formalized science has established itself as a private enterprise and points out:

Now bureaucratization and organization have placed much of science beyond public reach. Indeed, what used to be an international network of scientific information has been splintered into an arena of competing teams. The members as well as the artifacts of the scientific community have been locked into national and corporate programs oriented toward practical achievement, to the radical impoverishment of the men [and women] who support these nations and corporations (p. 61). 

The outcomes from this type of scientific practice are often highly political and can include the manipulation of a more altruistic form of science by such actions as withholding urgent information from the public under national security (Illich, 1971), non-disclosure of food and chemical ingredients to consumers under patent protections (Bowers, 2001; Kaufman, 2012), companies hiring scientists to conduct biased tests of their products to gain approval from regulatory agencies (Bencze & Alsop, 2014), and protecting industry relationships because of trust and resource issues between journals, publishers, universities, funding agencies, and industry professionals (Puniewska, 2014). These examples begin to illustrate some of the complexities involved within society’s use of science which in my mind immediately raises questions of a moral and ethical nature. 

With so many vested interests in scientific discovery, to uphold one’s moral standing within a given field of science is becoming increasingly problematic. As Bencze and Alsop point out, it is becoming increasingly “difficult for techno-scientists to maintain adherence to such claimed ‘standards of practice’ as conducting investigations without bias [...]” (p. 612) when capitalist mechanisms (i.e., competition, duty to shareholders, profitable interests) are in play. As I will explain in a later subsection, traditional approaches in the teaching of science do not sufficiently cover the many uses of science, the good and the bad. 

1.1.b Planetary crises created from society’s use of science

Through the emergence of privatized science, we are seeing major global dilemmas appear because of the misuse of science. We live in a time when human dominance of Earth’s resources has proven to be what Rockström et al. (2009) call a catastrophic disturbance to planetary boundaries. Planetary boundaries are described by Rockström et al. as the planetary thresholds which we, human beings, must respect if we are to avoid causing “deleterious or even catastrophic [damage] due to the risk of crossing thresholds that will trigger non-linear, abrupt environmental change within continental- to planetary-scale systems” (online, para. 1). The problem is that modern civilizations are not respecting these boundaries as the emergence of large-scale industries, propelled by scientific and technological advancements, have pushed planetary thresholds to the point of collapsing many life-sustaining systems (IPCC, 2013).

Of the planetary boundaries that exist, Steffen et al. (2015) suggest we concern ourselves most with those at “high-risk” stages such as the thresholds of biogeochemical flows (global cycling of nitrogen and phosphorus) and genetic biodiversity (global extinction rates). Also of growing concern are boundaries at “increasing-risk” stages such as land-system change and climate change as these thresholds are becoming more worrisome with each day that passes (IPCC, 2013; Rockström et al., 2009; Steffen et al., 2015). Boundaries that are in high- and increasing-risk stages are directly attributable to human-initiated disturbances and require immediate attention from a populace capable of recognizing, and acting upon, the sensitivity of these thresholds (IPCC, 2013). To better understand the full scale that is involved with the misuse of science toward planetary boundaries, I will explore two examples: biogeochemical flows and climate change.

Crisis #1: Biogeochemical flows

The cycling of nitrogen and phosphorus through the hydrosphere and biosphere is a natural process but due to human consumption and the discarding of these elements through fertilizers and sewage have we seen a dramatic increase in the movement of these nutrients into fresh- and salt-water estuaries causing large amounts of eutrophication (i.e., large algal blooms which create hypoxic environments killing off large amounts of wildlife due to a lack of oxygen in the water). This problem exists at a global level because large-scale agricultural production uses exorbitant amounts of fertilizers to maintain (if not increase) crop yields. On small scales this may not be a big issue other than leaving trace amounts of effluence within underground aquifers. However, when used on industrial scales, like those in California and throughout the Midwest, drastic `consequences from runoff and seepage can be devastating to entire habitats and ecosystems (Anderson et al., 2008). Practices like these are not uncommon to other modernized civilizations and we see this having devastating effects all around the globe (World Resources Institute, 2013) (Figure 1.1).

The biggest users of fertilizers come from industrial agriculture which relies heavily on the scientific findings of soil science which includes chemistry, physics, hydrology, and biology (a field of science known as edaphology). The misuse of science in this scenario comes from a shortsighted approach by decision makers who, operating under their own agenda and priorities, exclude or simply are unaware of other useful scientific information that may go against their goals and ambitions (Sarewitz & Pielke, 2007). The misuse of a more comprehensive science for the purposes of food production may not be nefarious in nature per se but at best it is a rather significant shortcoming of science used in the modern era.

Crisis #2: Climate change

The causes of climate change are certain and the main contributor to this crisis is carbon dioxide emissions fostered by the combustion of petroleum and coal from human usage. Pachauri et al. (2014) state, “Human influence on the climate system is clear, and recent anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gases are the highest in history. Recent climate changes have had widespread impacts on human and natural systems.” These widespread impacts extend beyond a shifting of rain events that can cause drought and have now shown to include war and civil unrest around the world. Parenti (2012) argues that military planners and political leaders see an “emerging climatologically driven civil war, refugee flows, pogroms, and social breakdown” (p. 19). We can clearly see that global-scale problems are arising from human disturbances but what role does science have in contributing to these crises?

What we are seeing in the disturbance of the aforementioned planetary boundaries is the outcome of industrial malfeasance as global crises continue to mount up. It is important to keep in mind that although science enables us to study these crises and educate others, it is also the use (or misuse) of science that has created these particular problems. Sarewitz and Pielke (2007) call attention to this by stating, “...science agendas are closely aligned with areas of technological application because certain areas of science demonstrate themselves to be of particular value to some groups of users” (p. 7). Sarewitz and Pielke have made a great observation in that the uses of science can benefit technological growth and advancement to “some groups of users” with those groups coming from academia, industry, government, and the general public.

It can be argued that each of the aforementioned higher- and increasing-risk boundaries (biogeochemical flows, genetic biodiversity, climate change, and land-system change) have had impacts spurred by the misuse of science. I have looked at biogeochemical flows and the influence that science has had on contributing to worldwide eutrophication levels. Similar arguments can be made for the science used in the extraction, production, and consumption of fossil fuels that contribute to climate change, to the elimination of habitats that have contributed to a decline in genetic biodiversity, and in the calculated removal of large swaths of forest cover for the purposes of food crops and wood/paper products. Science abounds for all sorts of purposes but it is clear that when these purposes are not met with sound decision-making for long-term health and prosperity then what we end up dealing with are major problems that have now become global.

How all of this is acknowledged in the teaching of science is my greatest concern. I believe what a student experiences and is made aware of can greatly influence how they perceive these planetary crises. Are students simply learning how certain chemical bonds react within stoichiometric equations that produce products to be consumed, or are they able to connect that industries they may very well work for are directly contributing to some pretty major problems? Do they understand climate change as global rainfall patterns over periods of time or do they see a connection with the electricity they use that contributes to the warming of the planet? Hodson (1998) suggests that on some level science education should be politicized so that students are “appreciating the societal impact of scientific and technological change, and recognizing that science and technology are, to some extent, culturally determined” (p. 21). What concerns me is that science education is teaching us a culturally determined ideology yet there seems to be some missing key dimensions such as morality and the misuses of science.

1.1.c Science and science education

I have shown how the misuse of science can create major global issues, I will now look at how institutionalized methods of science education can further heighten this dilemma by teaching science in a way that propagates bad scientific practices. Traditional methods in the teaching of science have proven inadequate in helping students make connections between the moral dimensions of science and society’s use of science (Hodson, 1998; Zeidler & Keefer, 2003). Bencze and Alsop (2014) make an interesting point into what may be causing this separation by suggesting:

Among the numerous and diverse actants integrated into the neoliberal capitalist network are professionals in fields of technoscience and science education (at primary, secondary & tertiary levels) – which, to a great extent, co-affect each other. Science education, of course, supplies fields of technoscience with practitioners who, as knowledge workers, engage in immaterial production that is essential for development and marketing of a range of products and services and associated semiotic messages – for now and for a speculative future (p. 612).

This statement has serious implications for students’ expectations as they begin an education in science. Is the purpose of science education simply to train technical skills to members of an up-and-coming workforce or are there more altruistic aspirations to produce “good” science? The realization that we have a growing community of scientific practitioners can be alarming considering how many students graduate with a degree in science every year and yet lack a greater awareness of who determines their educational experience and what the expectations are for them to create a livelihood from themselves (Levinson, 2014).

To demonstrate the concern surrounding traditional methods to science education, I will show some of the details involved with science education at a collegiate level. The U.S. Department of Education (2013) states that as of 2011-12 there were 141,354 graduates with a bachelor of science degree in the natural sciences and mathematics. Many of these students have attended traditional universities in the sense that curriculum is structured in a way to provide technical skills and workforce readiness (Casey, 2012; Tobin, 2014). These graduates have been educated mainly through the use of traditional content-based science teaching which focuses on subject matter with a concepts-only or concepts-first approach (Hodson, 1998). Examples of traditional science teaching include memorization of established facts from textbooks, assigned tasks with (or without) students’ interests, and hypothetical problems with an expected answer or outcome (Brunsell & Fleming, 2014). Because of the nature of traditional approaches to science education, we must ask ourselves if we are emphasizing a moral component strong enough so that students understand the larger context of how science can be used within society outside of purely technical and objective concepts.

In the state of Arizona, there are three major universities (Arizona State University, Northern Arizona University, and University of Arizona) which promote various career paths offered by the completion of a science degree. These career paths can range from mining and petroleum geologists, to manufacturing, agricultural, and military chemists, and to R&D consultants and biological testing technicians (ASU, n.d. -a; ASU, n.d. -b; ASU, n.d. -c; NAU, 2015a; NAU, 2015b; NAU, 2015c; U of A, n.d. -a; U of A, n.d. -b; U of A, n.d. -c). If major institutions are promoting careers that have fairly obvious moral dimensions to them (e.g., fossil fuel industries, biological testing, and agricultural chemists, etc.), it begs the question, how are we informing and influencing the moral perceptions of students through their education so they are aware of the various uses of the science they will be learning? This question seems vital to addressing the issues stated in the previous subsections as these very students will be graduating one day and moving on to work for companies that may very well add to the stresses of Earth’s systems and marginalize and/or harm others without proper discussions around these matters (Bird, 1996).

1.1.d Science education is lacking moral focuses

Making a case to include morality within science education is not easy as it largely does not exist and in the few cases it does there are challenging obstacles to its implementation. Morality involves many interpretations and many levels of understanding and there will always be challenges in what is considered right or wrong based on who’s vantage point one is taking but what is clear is that students of science should be exposed to exercising various ways of resolving contentious issues outside of a strictly scientific approach (Hodson, 2014). Many scholars and critics in the field of science education agree that what helps establish moral dimensions within science education involve character development, sociocultural and ecojustice considerations, and an opportunity for students to engage in the analysis and dialogue of meaningful life experiences (Hodson, 2014; Zeidler et al., 2014; Zeidler & Keefer, 2003). 

1.2 Meaningfulness of contribution and research questions

With this thesis I enter into the conversation of how morality operates within science education. As a student having earned my undergraduate degree in environmental sciences at NAU, I see a need to better facilitate discussions centered around the moral dimensions of scientific content in the classroom. Several scholars call attention to this need by recognizing the social dimensions of learning, acknowledging cultural issues associated with science, and matching prior knowledge to enhanced modes of moral reasoning (Hodson, 1998; Zeidler & Keefer, 2003). Although my study will not be able to look at all facets that relate morality to science education, it can contribute in the discussion of examining science students’ moral perceptions around society’s use of science toward global pressing issues (Figure 1.2).

Throughout my undergraduate degree I was required to take standard biology, geology, and chemistry courses to fulfill my prerequisites for graduation and that is where I began to question where the focus of morals and ethics were within science education. In those three subjects of science I noticed it was very technical and not very open for discussion of broader impacts or implications in the uses of science. I started to become concerned in the realization that young science explorers, students majoring in biology, geology, and chemistry, may not be getting the full scope of how their interest in science relates to more pressing global issues which other scholars such as Bowers (2001), Hodson (1998), and Orr (2004) would agree need to happen. One of my biggest concerns was that there was little deliberation within any of my classes of the moral implications involved with the use of information we received through our education. Carter et al. (2013) would say that a need for a degree of relevance and familiarity of an issue would help build a transformative experience so that the student can personalize their experience within science education. I noticed that my program focused a lot on global issues, albeit through a scientific lens opposed to say social or political, but that the material often seemed distant and unrelated to my own life as it was geared toward technical memorization and test-taking skills. Therefore, I see traditional approaches to science education having a gap in helping students develop a personalized experience of the knowledge they are acquiring so they understand the broader contexts mentioned earlier.

To help bring theory into application of my project I would like to put everything under a microscope so to speak. NAU offers several undergraduate degrees in the natural sciences with two main requirements needed for completion, university requirements and major requirements. Both of these requirements mandate that each student will fulfill what the university wants every student to complete and what each department that is offering a major wants the student to complete. Of both of these requirements the only courses found that offer a focus on ethics and/or morals (with the exception of the environmental sciences major) are elective courses. In other words, of the majors including biology, chemistry, and geology, none of them have an explicit nor mandatory focus on ethics or morals within their requirements for completion of an undergraduate science degree.

If students are given the option of whether to choose a course that focuses on some of the most important factors regarding the uses of science, it begs the question, is this enough or should we be doing something more drastic so that students are exposed to a consistent mode of moral consideration and thinking? Are we in need of a more radicalized form of science education, one that brings in the application of science front and center rather than an optional peripheral?

The descriptive and exploratory nature of this study aims to offer insight into how college students morally perceive high- and increasing-risk planetary boundaries in connection to their science education. I hope to enhance NAU’s academic and scientific communities by contributing to what Zeidler et al. (2014) call a “cultivation of scientific responsibility through the expression of social justice […]” (p. 90). This means that by acknowledging the social issues involved with the uses of science we may gain insight into how students’ morals are shaped when thinking about global issues. By asking the questions stated for this research, I may find answers that offer an idea of the role that college science education has in shaping and influencing students’ moral perceptions. My primary and secondary research questions for this study are as follows:

• In what ways do college-level science students perceive the moral dimensions surrounding society’s use of science when thinking of a given environmental crisis?

• How do students relate their moral perceptions to their college education?

Chapter conclusion

My thesis seeks to address the gaps and challenges associated with traditional methods of science education and the inclusion of moral dimensions of science. I want to better understand how the moral perceptions of global threats are constructed by students of science education. In particular, I am most interested in what sort of moral guidance is provided to up and coming scientists in their college-level science education. The following chapter entitled Theoretical Framework will discuss the theory of moral perception as a guideline for how I will investigate morality within science education.

Chapter 2 Literature Review

Overview

I first began thinking more deeply about the relationship between global issues, morality, science, and science education by attempting to find the locus where these seemingly separate components intersect. Zeidler & Keefer (2003) brought these attributes together in the following passage:

It may be argued that science educators and science teachers ought to view themselves as moral agents in decisions to emphasize the moral dimension of teaching (i.e., socioscientific issues). Such a view of teaching requires reflective (reflexive) moral action to constantly provide opportunities for students to engage in analysis and dialogue of meaningful life experiences (p. 11).

This excerpt brought my attention into thinking about how students of science perceive the world as moral agents when confronted with broader real-world issues that extend beyond the classroom. Students do not feel a sense of ownership and certainly no feelings of empowerment as they often regard science as a body of fixed, authoritative knowledge located in textbooks (Hodson, 1998). The following literature review investigates the limitations of traditional approaches to science education, research addressing these limitations, and the importance of including moral dimensions of science within science education.

2.1 Moral education

2.1.a Moral development and moral perception

Morality is a particular system of values and principles of conduct that vary, albeit relatively, from person to person (Kohlberg, 1984). An individual’s independent experiences alongside social influences help develop these belief systems into a set of rules that one applies as a standard for what is right and what is wrong in the world they perceive (Bandura, 2002; Kohlberg, 1984). When thinking of the moral development of students as they make their way through an academia, it is important to consider what moral development entails. 

Drawing from Kohlberg’s stages of moral development, as an individual progresses from nascent modes of moral reasoning and moral judgment to more sophisticated and encompassing stages, an individual will enhance their ability to apply more universal principles to a given situation. The idea of universal principles is best summed up anecdotally in Kohlberg’s (1981) Heinz dilemma scenario. The simple gist of the story is that a man, Heinz, is stealing an overpriced medication for his ailing wife who is dying of cancer and he gets caught in the act. Should he have stolen the drug or not? There are a range of responses often indicative of where on Kohlberg’s stages of moral development the morality lies. On one end of the spectrum there are two choices both at a beginning stage of moral rationale; either Heinz should steal the drug because its overpriced and he has no intention of stealing anything else, or he should not steal the drug because he could be put in prison which would give him a criminal record. Both choices have a reasoning that is more focused on the individual, Heinz, and how his decision will mainly affect him (decision centered on self rather than his ailing wife). On the other end of the moral reasoning spectrum, he should steal the drug because the value of any drug should not be considered more valuable than that of a human life, or he should not steal the drug because although his wife is ailing there may also be others who are in need and can afford to pay for it so he should leave it be. Now the focus is centered around valuing human lives over private property rights. Depending on the sophistication of an individual’s (or society’s) thought process, the determination of whether or not his act (or non-act) was right or wrong varies with different interpretations around the same decision.

Understanding the dimensionality and complexity of morality is important for students to think about when looking at the global effects of climate change and other disturbances to planetary boundaries as we all may not agree on what is most important and what should be prioritized. Issues such as disturbances to planetary boundaries can have the same kind of moral spectrum as that in the Heinz dilemma scenario in that depending on how an individual sees things will greatly affect their willingness to act (Hodson, 1998). It is important for students of science to be able to understand this diversity and range of moral thinking. 

Not all moral development can be summed up by an individual’s cognitive abilities. For example, Zeidler and Keefer (2003) acknowledge that a person’s moral judgments could “be greatly impacted by emotional and cognitive conflicts due to varying degrees of ambiguities and contradictions inherent between culture and context” (p. 24). Although the moral cognitive abilities of an individual can help explain how someone comes to a particular judgment within their reasoning, they do not account for how an individual initially recognizes and interprets a given situation nor how emotionality plays into that recognition. For example, someone in a calm state might recognize characteristics of a situation differently than if that same individual were in a state of dismay.

2.1.b The importance of moral perception

A person’s moral development can be explored in many ways and I have chosen to look at a person’s moral perception as mentioned earlier within the theoretical framework for this thesis. Blum (1994) takes an interesting position because he does not follow the rigidity of Kohlberg’s developmental process of moral reasoning based on a cognitive framework and instead considers the salience-perception of an individual before they deliberate about what is moral, amoral, or immoral. By evaluating what is most noticeable or important to the individual, I hope to gain an understanding into how science students morally perceive global issues based upon a level of recognition that they perceive the issue with (if at all). Moral judgments are made from a construction of moral reasoning but all of that is based upon the context that the individual places on a given issue or situation. It is the moral perception of the student that will determine: 1) if they see a situation as one that is an “issue” to begin with, 2) if they find features of that issue (if any) as morally significant, and 3) if they are associating a set of guided principles on what should be done to mitigate the problem (Blum, 1994). 

2.1.c Moral education within science education

If we consider the social influences that affect an individual’s morality, and how that influence can guide an individual’s moral perception, it would make sense to examine institutions of education for their ability in teaching moral components. Institutions of education are often large organizations that divulge a multitude of intelligible facts and concepts that guide students in one direction or another. Kohlberg (1971) suggests, “Educational ideologies include value assumptions about what is educationally good or worthwhile” (p. 463). With this in mind, what assumptions are made by educational institutions and who do those assumptions best serve? This concern is important to deliberate as science education, in large part, follows a tradition of teaching science within a moral vacuum (Witz & MacGregor, 2003). 

Implementing moral educational factors within science education can be achieved. Colucci-Gray and Camino (2014) suggest implementing curriculum that includes participatory and interdisciplinary activities so that students learn to become actively engaged with issues in their community that in turn help them learn to incorporate moral and ethical considerations. In order to do this, Roth (2014) suggests that activist groups who work in the community involve students alongside the general public in their events and activities. Roth calls these sites for science education as many activist groups use science as a way to strengthen their message through scientifically-based public discourse which in turn helps to develop moral action. With these sorts of practices becoming more mainstream, students can better link moral perception and moral judgment to a change (or enhancement) in behavior (Bird, 1996).

2.2 Traditional approaches to science education

2.2.a Science literacy

The term science literacy is a phrase used to express an individual’s ability to read, write, listen, and speak about scientific matters (Hurley, 1998). There is, however, a contention among various formalized institutions on how science literacy is interpreted and ultimately taught in schools (Hurley, 1998). For example, the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) National Science Board (2014) defines science literacy as:

The degree to which respondents demonstrate an understanding of basic scientific terms, concepts, and facts; an ability to comprehend how [Science] & [Technology] generates and assesses evidence; and a capacity to distinguish science from pseudoscience are widely used indicators of basic scientific literacy.

This definition differs from what other formal organizations have chosen to emphasize. For example, the National Academy of Sciences’ National Research Council (1996), a branch of the National Academy of Sciences, defined science literacy with similar descriptors as those used by NSF’s National Science Board but with an emphasis on economic, political, and social aspects by adding, “Scientific literacy is the knowledge and understanding of scientific concepts and processes required for personal decision making, participation in civic and cultural affairs, and economic productivity” (p. 22). As one can see there are similarities between the two definitions but the latter goes beyond an individual’s level of technical expertise so that their interpretation of science is connected to their decision-making role within a broader social world. The latter definition expands the meaning of science literacy to incorporate a personal investment and responsibility in how the understanding of science can be used in an applicable sense for the benefit of the individual and society. 

Many academic scholars, science teachers, and science education critics, collectively, argue that if society is to become more scientifically-literate then that society needs to respond appropriately to the impacts that are caused from society’s use of science (Bader & Laberge, 2014; Choi et al., 2011; Colucci-Gray & Camino, 2014; Herman, 2014; Hodson, 2014). What is proving to be problematic in raising a society that is well-informed and capable of processing scientific discourse is that traditional methods of science teaching (e.g., memorization of established facts from textbooks, assigned tasks with or without students’ interests, and hypothetical problems with an expected answer or outcome) often leave out practices that incorporate the moral dimensions surrounding serious and important issues (Zeidler & Keefer, 2003). If students of science are unable to consider a world beyond the classroom, and the moral implications of that world, and instead focus solely on memorizing content then they will be ill-equipped to deliberate over differing perspectives which can include an interconnected relationship among communal, societal, and global understandings (Hodson, 2010; Zeidler et al., 2014). A call for attention into the moral dimensions of science education needs to be made so that students are given the opportunity to better comprehend the multifarious uses of science and become aware of who benefits from scientific enterprise and who does not if an encompassing scientific-literate society is to exist. The question then comes to mind, how is this possible if science education is heavily institutionalized where interests on local, state, and federal levels put heavy pressures on expectations and standards?

2.2.b Institutionalized science education

Major providers of science education, such as colleges and universities, should be critically examined as they are the accredited establishments with whom society entrusts to inform, educate, and guide upcoming scientists, scholars, and academics (Orr, 2004). Teaching students to become scientifically literate within these institutions can be challenging as certain areas of knowledge can be (and often are) favored over others at the expense of ethical, social, political and cultural analysis (Bader & Laberge, 2014). What winds up being favored depends on the expected outcomes of a given educational institution. Many of those institutions place an emphasis on valuing the disciplinary sciences as a method of producing scientists that will add an economic advantage in an increasingly globalized world (Tobin, 2014). This can be problematic as shown in the introduction of this thesis.

The challenge of creating and maintaining a more comprehensive practice of science education is nothing new to educational institutions. Part of the challenge comes from the fact that colleges and universities are beholden to a group of diverse actants whom are integrated within a neoliberal capitalist network (e.g., corporations, individual financiers, governments, private foundations, etc.) that are influenced, and in some cases directly mandated, to produce practitioners of technoscience for profit-making industries (Bencze & Alsop, 2014). Illich (1971) warned against schools forging down a path such as this where students are conditioned to receive a manipulated form of education where ideas and thoughts are pre-determined and intended to be accepted as forms of indoctrination. Illich calls these students “consumer pupils” where their sole purpose is to consume curriculum that teaches them “to feel guilty if they do not behave according to the predictions of consumer research by getting the grades and certificates that will place them in the job category they have been led to expect” (p. 30). This is something that modern researchers are still seeing practiced today (Rodriguez, 2014).

2.3 Contemporary research within science education

2.3.a Science education: Perspectival abilities and critical thought

I began researching topics that address the problem I stated in the introduction of this thesis by looking at current theories that tie together science education, morality, and global environmental issues. I came across a group of scholars who have put together several publications over the past six years that, interestingly, look at how students and teachers connect themselves to a broader global community. This section will reveal what some of the more modern scholars have discovered and concluded about the relationship between students’ perception of global issues and their sense of morality. 

In 2010, Liu, Lin, and Tsai published an article that investigated the scientific epistemological views and reasoning processes of college-level students surrounding the environmental management practices of invasive exotic species. The authors’ premise that science educators need to better prepare science students, students who are destined to become science and technology practitioners, with a holistic approach in the understanding of real issues is at the heart of why moral education is so important to have within science education. The study looked at a population of 177 students, two groups consisting of science and non-science majors, and what they thought about the aforementioned environmental management practices. The differences between the two groups were significant where science majors appear to reason based on a single disciplinary perspective while non-science majors demonstrated a better ability to take multiple perspectives into consideration when attempting to understand the complexity of the issue. Liu et al. attribute this ability from non-science majors to an education they are exposed to that has a more interdisciplinary approach that extends beyond technological science disciplines. 

Liu et al. (2010) offer some amount of evidence that students majoring in a discipline of science lack an ability to recognize features that do not fit within their structured paradigm. For example, Liu et al. found that non-science majors did a better job thinking about the ecological, ethic-aesthetic, and social-economic features of the issue where their science counterparts tended to focus solely on scientific-technological reasoning. What this study shows is that a student’s major can influence what they recognize as particular moral features of a given issue based on the familiarity of information they are provided within their respective disciplines. 

Some of the reasons why the limitations in the perspective-taking abilities of science students exist is due to a disconnect between a student’s personal experience and the conceptualization of ideas that are introduced in the classroom (Simonneaux, 2014). Conceptually learning about real issues can leave many gaps in how a student constructs their understanding due to the canonized nature of science (Hodson, 2014). In order to bridge the gap between conceptual frameworks that surround an issue in the classroom and the experiential interpretation by the student, science education should incorporate practices that facilitate critical thought (Carter et al., 2014; Liu et al., 2011; Simonneaux, 2014). Some examples of what is meant by critical thought include: engaging in argumentation that is supported by evidence, validating epistemic claims, analyzing assumptions and their underlying structures, and assessing different stances on complex issues (Carter et al., 2014; Simonneaux, 2014). 

Difficulties can arise from eliciting critical thought surrounding real issues that may directly challenge norms and institutional positions. Simonneaux (2014) argues:

The challenge lies in elaborating high level cognitive procedures: identifying the conflicting interests of stakeholders, evaluating the risks and uncertainties, generating debate and pinpointing the fallacies, cultivating socio-scientific reasoning, ethical judgment, identifying the actors’ values, assessing the evidence and critically analyzing the research methodology and the expertise, etc. (p. 101)

For students who are in their young adulthood this might seem like an unrealistic goal if we expect them to take the initiative in thinking at a highly critical level. However, some scholars do believe there is a way to have them at least begin to think in ways that are more critical than where they would otherwise be. For example, Choi et al. (2011) believe that focusing on students’ metacognition can help them in “reflecting and managing cognition and learning, in solving complex problems, and dealing with challenging local and global issues” (p. 682). Choi et al. suggest that teaching students the importance of metacognition is vital in fostering the growth and development of their personal perspectives to connect them to societal and global issues by engaging students in a way that will allow them to see the perspectives of others and how that may differ from their own. Lee et al. (2013) agree with this idea and urge educators to use a scaffolding method where broaching a given issue at a level that is appropriate for students to relate to is a good beginning point but to then expand the scope of the conversation to have them consider their own positions and that of others in a moment of argumentation, debate, and assessment.

To expand on this notion of students engaging with one another in a series of dialogue and reflection, it is important to remember that science students are not void of the influences that come from a larger scientific community that they are a part of. Simonneaux (2014) argues that science students need to extend their circles of influence beyond communities of science (and the social values contained therein) to include political communities so that philosophical perspectives can be shared and valued. If the scientific community itself cannot connect to a world beyond its own circles then how can it be critical of its own self and how would it be able to address scientific issues that are political and/or social in nature? I think about the planetary boundary of climate change as an example that demonstrates this difficulty as scientists and politicians have varying ideas about the severity of the issue and how to deal with it. Environmental issues in general can be analyzed through a scientific perspective but often times these same issues extend into social and political worlds that can have important impacts on how these issues are addressed and resolved.

2.3.b Character development

Tying environmental issues to science education is one thing, but weaving in the complexity of looking at these issues through a moral lens and how to assess that can prove quite a bit more challenging. Several publications (Choi et al., 2011; Lee et al., 2013; Lee et al., 2012; Zeidler, 2014) have looked at these connections and have collectively determined some key features worth discussing. Choi et al. (2011) state, “As we move from a context that focuses on the individual and society to a more global context, the science education community needs to rethink what all students need to understand to live in the 21st century” (p. 689). Choi et al. suggest that looking at a student’s character and value-system can play a role in understanding how they develop a sense of responsibility, compassion, and decision-making that address global socio-scientific issues (SSI). Several scholars agree with this claim and have concluded that helping science students develop values and character is vastly needed as contemporary methods of teaching science have fallen short by concentrating too much on building positive attitudes and interest around science but not fully engaging students in a way that helps them see the seriousness of important and relevant issues (Choi et al., 2011; Lee et al., 2013; Zeidler et al., 2014). To be clear, character in this context is defined best by Berkowitz (2002) as “...psychological characteristics that affect that person’s ability and inclination to function morally. [...] characteristics that lead a person to do the right thing or not do the right thing” (p. 48). Character development is crucial in giving students a lasting impression on how to effectively recognize and debate SSI in ways that help them expand their perspective-taking abilities (Lee et al., 2012).

Character development includes many facets but one attribute worth discussing is the relationship between how an individual manifest this for themselves with their own self interests in mind and how this connects to an external and social world. This is important because it is the one element that can connect the individual to their external environment in a responsible and caring way. Reflexive thinking is one recommendation from Zeidler et al. (2014) and described as a person’s “desire to consistently hold one’s actions up for internal scrutiny [as] a fundamental feature of conscience and ultimately a forerunner to the development of character” (p. 88). As mentioned earlier with metacognition, reflexive judgment is another method of self-evaluation where an individual scrutinizes their own thoughts and actions. This self-evaluation can draw that type of scrutiny outward to an external world where democratic group decision-making, the fostering of human values and caring, and learning how to nurture emotional intelligence become more practiced (Zeidler & Nichols, 2009). 

In determining the development of character within science education, Lee et al. (2013) constructed a study where they investigated the effectiveness of a curriculum that introduced character and values as focal points to a group of ninth-grade science students surrounding the SSI of GMO technology. Lee et al. found that character and values as an educational emphasis helped students demonstrate higher sensitivity levels of compassion and moral/ethical considerations toward diverse people who are alienated and marginalized by the advancements of GMO technologies. Based on their results, Lee et al. assert that an education that focuses on character development contributes to bettering a student’s perspective-taking abilities and empathic capacities. This study, as well as others (Fowler et al., 2009; Lee et al., 2012), offers evidence that educational approaches that incorporate dimensions of character development, a method going beyond the teaching of scientific “facts”, enable students to experience the complexity of issues related to science and technology. Studies such as this show an important need in better understanding the full scope of what science students experience and how that influences the development of their character.

2.3.c Socioscientific issues (SSI) education

Socioscientific issue (SSI)-based educational approaches have shown promising results in helping science students develop character and improve moral sensitivity toward SSI. This is accomplished through techniques and practices such as processes of inquiry, discourse, conflict, argumentation, negotiation, compromise, decision-making, and commitment (Zeidler & Keefer, 2003). SSI-based approaches bring students together under different scientific foci to discuss and evaluate complex issues when scientific information is used in the operation of society. Students are able to discuss the environmental and social impacts of societal and global issues through this framework by exercising moral reasoning (Berkowitz, 2002; Kohlberg, 1984; Zeidler & Keefer, 2003). Moral reasoning can be seen as an extension of an individual’s moral and character development by their cognitive abilities to form a rationale about what they see as right and wrong in the world.

Many scholars agree that providing an SSI approach toward a student’s education can be very effective in bringing about enhanced modes of awareness, responsibility, and moral sensitivity (Fowler et al., 2009; Lee et al., 2013; Sadler, 2004; Walker et al, 2007). Studies that have explicitly examined the effectiveness of SSI-based approaches conclude that educational institutions should incorporate SSI as a viable and worthy component of science education as it addresses many factors often completely left out of more traditional approaches (Fowler et al., 2009; Walker et al., 2007). Sadler (2004) suggests that an SSI approach “could be used as a stimulus to encourage student consideration and appreciation of the complex interdependencies of science, society and morality” (p. 355). These studies collectively offer the opinion that SSI-based approaches are an effective and enhanced alternative to traditional approaches as it better connects students to the moral and ethical issues that become apparent when we look at the use of science in society.

2.3.d Criticism of SSI approaches

Despite the fact that some forms of an SSI-based approach have proved successful in bringing about higher levels of empathy and compassion toward global issues, it has been argued that this approach also leaves gaps in how a student feels they can act as a moral agent toward the issue itself (Choi et al., 2011). For example, students may be exposed to information regarding a specific issue in society and how that issue might be negatively affecting others but yet they feel inefficaciously inadequate to resolve larger-scale societal issues due to feeling overwhelmed or not understanding how their personal values align with a broader community (Choi et al., 2011; Lee et al., 2013; Lee et al., 2012). This point is important because having empathy and acting on that empathy can be two different experiences (Hodson, 2010). 

Although SSI can help us understand some of the processes involved with moral reasoning and judgment and how that relates to a sense of responsibility and awareness, it still leaves questions unanswered with how to incorporate cultural beliefs and normative values carried out within a world in need of action. Hodson (2010) argues:

I do not believe that current conceptions of [...] SSI-oriented science education go far enough. My inclination is toward a much more radical, politicized form of SSI-oriented teaching and learning in which students not only address complex and often controversial SSI, and formulate their own position concerning them, but also prepare for, and engage in, sociopolitical actions that they believe will make a difference (p. 198-199).

Hodson’s view is that science education must go beyond simply acknowledging the moral and ethical considerations of science in a social context and instead become more radical in the delivery of a student’s experiences. Choi et al. (2011) also deviate from the initial framework of SSI by stating that, “we need to nurture individuals who are able to appreciate diversity of values and cultures surrounding issues, to have compassion for others, collaboratively construct values for the larger welfare, and ultimately take action” (p. 690). This is not to say that an SSI-approach is not effective but the argument is that it needs to prepare students for roles as active participants in the community they are a part of (Hodson, 2010).

Chapter conclusion

The literature I have reviewed for this thesis demonstrates the need to integrate science literacy, science education, global issues, and morality into a cohesive framework so that we can better understand, and contribute towards, the moral perceptions of science students. Since science education is one of many vehicles used to deliver science literacy, institutions such as colleges and universities have an obligation to educate moral dimensions of the content they serve to avoid contributing to issues that are quickly becoming global. SSI educational approaches address this need by focusing on the enhancement of a student’s moral development. The studies on SSI and science education that I have reviewed do not show any connections between students’ moral perception about issues that relate to science and its uses in society. For the purposes of this study, I am not interested in exploring the gaps found within SSI but rather to use it as a guiding framework to look into the perceptions of students as moral agents in relation to various global issues.

Chapter 3 Theoretical Framework

Overview

My theoretical framework for this project was taken from Blum’s (1994) Moral perception and particularity. Blum’s work addressed the psychological attributes associated with how an individual recognizes a particular situation (and the particularities of that situation) as one that is moral and how that individual would then deliberate and ultimately implement some correct course of action. I chose this framework as a way of investigating how science students perceive a given global crisis as it allows me to explore the subtleties and sensitivities that each student possess without making any sort of empirical claim about their moral agency toward said crisis. The details of how this framework accomplishes these notions will be explained in the following sections. I will conclude this chapter by further discussing how this framework fits within the appropriateness of my project and thesis. 

3.1 Moral perception and particularity

The particularities and sensitivities that Blum describe help illustrate some of the finer details involved in how our morality is activated and eventually acted upon. He describes these components as entities that make us feel alive to a given situation and enable us to see it as something that is moral in the first place. Moral perception differs from classical theories of morality in that there is a type of impartial attitude implicit within principle-based constructs that do not account for the various sensitivities that an individual brings to particular situations. 

Although the theory of moral perception is not as abundantly published, nor well established, as other moral constructs (e.g., moral judgment and moral reasoning) it still raises interesting and important points in the formation and access of morality. Blum describes the process of moral perception as an ignition of an individual’s ability to make sense of the particularities of a situation in a salient manner when something is perceived as a violation of some sort. The process he discusses looks at what occurs before someone reaches a decision about what actions need (or need not) be taken to resolve a moral situation. Blum states that there are three key steps to an individual initiating their moral perception and they are: 1) initially recognizing a particular situation as one that is “moral”, 2) having an ability to identify morally significant features based on the individual’s interpretation, and 3) determining which set of guided principles are called upon to motivate action(s) toward a resolution of the situation. By using these three steps in the evaluation of my own data collected for this project, I intend to present how students of science morally perceive a given global crisis and how their education has helped influence that perception. I will now discuss in more detail the finer points involved with identifying the three steps of moral perception.

3.1.a Step 1: Recognition of moral situations

The first step in analyzing moral perception is to look at how an individual recognizes a situation by its initially perceived features. Blum calls this an individuating of the situation where the individual becomes alive to the moment by associating familiarities of what is seen with the individual’s own experiences and prior knowledge. This individuating, or initial interpretation, is what allows moral perception to subsequently unfold. The initial perception of a situation is an embryonic type of recognition where things become more clear to the individual they will begin to see things of a certain character, context, and circumstance. To help better describe what I mean by this, Blum suggests we look at three key factors of particularity that apply to moral perception and they are: perceptual particularities, particularistic attitude, and detail particularity. These three factors offer a more complete understanding of how a situation is initially perceived which I will now go into brief detail in the following paragraphs.

~Factor 1–Perceptual particularities 

As we are all guided by how we view the world and what we see as right and wrong, there are particular recognitions that will ultimately frame what it is that we perceive. Blum (1994) states that perceptual particularities help address “a gap between an intellectual adherence to and grasp of principles of justice on the one hand, and the recognition of particular situations confronting one as violating (or otherwise implicating) those principles...” (p. 51). Although our values help shape our moral principles, it is initially what we see and recognize in a given situation that will determine if those principles are brought into our conscious mind. This initial recognition is something that will either allow us to see a particular situation as one that is moral, immoral, or amoral. Herman (1993) supports this notion by saying that certain gaps that are found between an individual’s notions of justice and failing to see a moral situation before them is “not a failure of moral judgment, but a failure of moral awareness or sensitivity” (p. 79). I see this as a type of proclivity for behavioral habits to establish themselves in the contribution to, or diminishment of, many of the problems stated in the introduction of this thesis. 

~Factor 2–Particularistic attitude

A particularistic attitude is an aspect of a responsible moral agent’s outlook which is brought into every situation. This attitude enables an individual to understand that each moment may differ from others even though on the surface they appear similar. One would have a particular set of moral sensibilities that they bring to a situation where they are cognizant that features and principles that applied for other seemingly similar situations may or may not apply the same for the one that is being faced.

~Factor 3–Detail particularity

Blum describes detail particularity as a unique type of sensitivity that comes subsequent to perceptual particularity and/or a particularistic attitude. This is where an individual holds a particular degree of detailed understanding toward features of what is coming to be recognized as a moral situation. Individuals contain a degree of understanding based on their experiences, prior knowledge, and familiarity. This is important in assessing the appropriateness of an individual’s position to the situation as well as the severity of what is taking place. For example, Herman (1993) helps elucidate this distinction well when she says:

There is no doubt that moral principle alone cannot make you sensitive to need. So if you do not see that another is in pain (know what pain looks like) and appreciate what pain signifies (know why and when pain is to be avoided), you will not be an effective helping agent, however correct your principles of action may be (81).

Blum and Herman seem to intersect on this idea that if an individual has an inclination to be mindful of, and on some level familiar with, the details of moral situations then the individual would be capable of connecting and relating to the features through compassion, care, and empathy rather than delaying the whole process by deliberating over a rigid principle-based structure. For example, such details that would make one more susceptible toward empathy and compassion are understanding and deeply connecting to another’s gender, culture, socioeconomic status, etc. and how that might affect a moral situation that presents itself. Detail particularity is concerned with an individual’s active pursuit of salient details in any given situation which further heightens their moral perception and awareness.

3.1.b Step 2: Morally significant features

Now that I have laid out a baseline of the characteristics involved with the first step of moral perception, let’s take a look at the second step. This step takes the recognition of a situation as one that contains moral features and explicitly determines some of those features to be morally significant. Step one differs from step two in that the former is a “still developing” stage where certain recognitions are not quite categorized or prioritized as clarification of the moral significance is still needed in knowing what exactly it is that the perceiver is seeing. If a situation becomes categorized as a moral one then what are the significant features that make it so? The perception that one holds becomes more solidified and grounded within step two as initial recognitions of features and one’s own values and principles converge into a point of clarity therefore the individual is able to explicitly determine what it is that is morally significant. Within step two a deliberation process begins to take place as the categorization of features start to become prioritized leading into step three (implementation of principles).

Blum points out that in step two there lies a response that bypasses a deliberation process. He says this factor is connected to an individual’s “general features of their character and their moral make-up” (p. 45) and that “the morally charged description of the situation salient for that moral agent itself already contains her reason for action...” (p. 42). For example, an individual may have moral sensitivities established in the familiarity of racism, suffering, and/or corruption and any features perceived as such automatically trigger an active response. The discussion of step three in the next subsection will help draw out a distinction between this response in step two and the implementation of principles. 

3.1.c Step 3: Implementation of principles

The third step in moral perception consists of several components involving how an individual moves forward from perceiving a situation as a moral one, and recognizing its morally significant features, to determining what is best to do about the situation. Blum continues to explain that as an individual proceeds from how they characterize the moralization of a situation they will come to a point where questions are raised as to whether one’s agency should engage with what is going on. Blum calls this agency engagement as not every situation requires an action to be taken but the very questioning if one should take action constitutes a deliberation of moral proportions. As an individual proceeds through their deliberation they will eventually surface with a principle or rule that fits for proposing a particular response. This can include the need to act or in some cases not to act as any further additions to the situation could make matters worse. These components, collectively, complete the process of moral perception. 

3.2 Moral perception, moral judgment, and ethic of care

Moral perception and moral judgment share an interconnection when thinking of how a decisive action that an individual takes is based on a clearly perceived situation (Herman, 1993). This is to say that our judgments and our perceptions are not mutually exclusive because of the relationship they both have to an individual’s principles and values. Blum (1994) points out that “the moral principles we consciously adopt are in part a reflection of our moral perceivings, and conversely our moral perceptions are in part shaped by our consciously adopted moral principles” (p. 31). Here I can see a reciprocity between perception and principles where an individual will have had some grounded values with which to base their perceptions on while simultaneously having their perceptions affect the current condition and application of their principles. This exchange between perception and principles is what helps an individual eventually carry out a judgment, as discussed in Blum’s framework.

I feel it is important to briefly discuss the structure that ties moral perception together with moral judgment as the latter has been theorized to a much larger extent than the former. Kohlberg (1975/2000) suggests that the relationship between moral judgment and logical reasoning are what lead to moral behavior (p. 602). Blum (1994), however, argues that the ability of a person’s responsiveness is fundamentally missing in Kohlberg’s theory and uses an example of a comparison between a child’s responsiveness and their reasoning to demonstrate what is missing when he says the following: 

The moral significance of responsiveness does not lie in the child’s appreciation of moral standards. There is no necessary implication that a child who is responsive to another thinks of helping the other as conformity to a standard of right and wrong, or good or bad, or that she sees herself as in conformity with a standard of behavior that defines what it is to be a good person (p. 197).

By looking at the relationship between moral reasoning and responsiveness, it may start to become clear that other factors of moral behavior extend beyond an inductive or deductive logical interpretation as behaviors such as empathy and compassion, as it will be argued, are just a few of the internalized processes that lie outside of the boundaries of reason-based moral judgments that influence and impact one’s moral perceptions.

One important component that has not been discussed up to this point, that bears relevance to understanding moral perception from a different perspective, is that of Carol Gilligan’s work and her theory on what she calls ethic of care. Her interpretation of moral development challenged the principle-/justice-based reasoning argument that Kohlberg put forward in his moral stages framework that define the process of moral judgment. Gilligan (1977) elaborates on the relational aspects of morality in its connection to moral judgment by claiming that an individual’s orientation of underlying principles, in relation to their environment, can determine how moral attributes are processed and applied (p. 511). Some of the concepts that came out of Gilligan’s work influenced Blum’s (1994) moral perception framework by looking at the orienting characteristics that connect an individual to their environment which include some of the following traits: direct concern for individual human beings and their needs; empathic attentiveness toward others; sensitivity toward others; compassion; emotional support and nurturance; sensitivity to particular context into the details of individual situations; concern for the vulnerable; and exhibiting and valuing qualities especially appropriate to personal and familial relations. 

Blum’s (1994) framework draws these orienting characteristics into the concept of a particularity in looking at how the unique features that an individual is attuned to are affected by the infusion of feeling that comes with the experience of a given situation. The first two factors of Step 1 within the moral perception framework directly involve these components of Gilligan’s theory. Perceptual particularity and particularistic attitude are Blum’s interpretations of bringing the sensitivities of the individual, and the implicit empathic outlook an individual holds, into a realized experience. 

The idea of moral judgment and an ethic of care are brought together within the moral perception framework as both elaborate on the complexity involved with understanding how an individual would perceive a situation as one that contains moral features. Gilligan influenced my thinking in a way to acknowledge that beyond having preconceived notions of what is right and wrong, there is an emotional disposition that influences our decision-making abilities beyond an oversimplified reasoning process. This is not to say that Kohlberg’s reasoning argument does not carry its own credibility but that Gilligan’s ethic of care offered a realization that different types of moral orientations exist (e.g., justice-orientation vs. care-orientation). Due to the nature of my study as one that is focusing on the individual student, it is important to acknowledge that some understanding of external influences will be left out as without presenting the participant with a situation that would call upon their care activation, they will only be able to offer some insight into what Blum defines within the first step of moral perception.

Chapter conclusion

Kohlberg and Gilligan have made significant strides in the understanding of how morality works within our psychological operations but I think Blum offers an insightful point of view worth taking into consideration as the moral perception framework acts as an entry point into the processing of an individual’s moral constructs and principles. I can start to see how theories by Kohlberg, Gilligan, and Blum begin to converge by looking at the following three characteristics (Blum, 1994):

1. The conception of moral agency in a principle-based ethic already contains moral perception and particularistic sensitivities. 

2. The commitment to the primacy of principle entails a moral commitment to develop perceptual and particularistic sensitivities. 

3. The conceptual resources of principle-based theories can be mustered to express what is involved in moral perception and particularistic sensitivity. 

What becomes apparent is that as one moves through life and constructs the principles and rules they live by, it is an interchange between agency, principles, and perceptions that ultimately define a person’s experienced reality and thus the judgments they place on situations perceived to be moral.

It is in this understanding of principle-based moral perceptions that I propose investigating how those principles and perceptions are influenced by the student’s experience in science education. Unlike moral judgment where deliberation is essential in the process of formulating a correct course of action based on an individual’s established principles (Blum, 1988), moral perception allows me to better understand how particularities within a student’s understanding of global crises help shape those principles through their education in science. This is not to say that an individual will only have those principles established within science education but I am curious to see what, if any, influence their science education has had on creating, modifying, or challenging their previously-held principles and looking at how those are expressed.

Chapter 4 Methodology

Overview

This chapter will discuss the methods I used in the investigation of moral perceptions held by science students surrounding society’s use of science toward pressing global issues. In the following sections I explain my research design, research participants and recruitment, data collection and instrumentation, data analysis, the precautions taken to protect the confidentiality and privacy of participants, and the limitations of this study.

4.1 Research design

I began designing my research project by repeatedly asking myself, in what ways do college-level science students perceive the moral dimensions surrounding society’s use of science in relation to environmental topics? I primarily used a qualitative methodological approach and have aimed for characteristics that Corbin and Strauss (2015) state as common attributes among qualitative researchers: having a sense of logic, having an ability to recognize variation as well as regularity, accepting one’s self as a research instrument, and having a humanistic bent. I have taken these characteristics as a guideline into my research process as I sought to understand the finer details involved with how science students morally perceive the use of science beyond the classroom.

Since I am basing my qualitative methodological approach on the theory of moral perception, I constructed questions throughout the investigative process in a way that elicit a response to one or more of the three steps of moral perception: 1) do students recognize a given situation as a moral one, 2) can they articulate morally significant features of that situation, and 3) do they show any kind of deliberation or course of action in resolving the morally-perceived issue (Blum, 1994). The following sections explain, in detail, the approaches and methods I used in the acquisition and processing of data from college-level science students.

4.2 Methods for data collection and analysis

4.2.a Recruitment of participants

The population for this study included college-level seniors majoring in a discipline of science. This group consisted of students closest to the completion of their undergraduate degree and was the population most relevant to help answer my research questions. There was a two-part process in the recruitment of viable participants. For the first phase, I determined that approaching 400-level science classrooms (4th- and/or 5th-year senior-level classes) would be the best way to find participants for an initial screening survey. This survey would help recruit volunteers for the second phase of the project which were more in-depth focus group sessions that would consist of 18 students (spread evenly among three focus group sessions). 

4.2.b Instrumentation

In order to understand the moral perceptions of college science students, I combined a Likert-scale survey along with focus group interviews as my instruments of inquiry. The Likert-scale survey served as a screening tool in order to determine the student’s reflexive sense of familiarity with the subject matter before involving them within a more in-depth conversation held during the focus group sessions. The focus group sessions will allow for participants to openly speak their mind when asked questions pertaining to society’s use of science and climate change. It should be noted that the focus group sessions were not set up to expose participants to actual moral situations but instead were arranged to ask questions that required a reflexive element to their responses.

~Data collection I~Survey (screening process)

The survey for this study was composed of a mix of Likert-scale and open-answer prompts. The 5-point Likert-scale component was used to offer a range of options (from strongly agree to strongly disagree) for students to respond to in their recognition of society’s use of science toward critical environmental topics (survey found in Appendix A). The open-answer component gave each student an opportunity to state what they understood as relevant features to a given topic, if they found it familiar. For the environmental topics that were presented in the survey, I used four of the most pressing issues presented within the planetary boundaries framework (Rockström et al, 2009; Steffen et al., 2015) that were mentioned earlier in the Introduction chapter. Prompts within the survey covered the environmental topics of climate change, biogeochemical flows, land-system change, and biosphere integrity. At the beginning of each topical section, I gave a brief description so that students were given a scientific context and association of the material to their college education. Below is an example of the format used in the survey with the planetary boundary of climate change:

Climate change is a topic focusing on atmospheric weather patterns over extended periods of time. Carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas emissions and heat exchanges between the atmosphere and the surface of the Earth are important factors of this topic. Please answer the following questions based upon your perception of how science can be used towards this topic.

1. I have discussed climate change in (at least) one science course while attending NAU. (Please choose: Strongly Disagree-Disagree-Neutral-Agree-Strongly Agree)

2. I can think of ways that society uses scientific processes, approaches, and ideas towards climate change. (Please choose: Strongly Disagree-Disagree-Neutral-Agree-Strongly Agree)

3. Please list 2-3 things that come to mind when you think of how society’s use of science affects, impacts, and/or addresses (positively and/or negatively) climate change. When answering, please keep your response short by listing 2-3 brief, descriptive phrases.

Six additional questions were added at the beginning of the survey for demographic and identifier purposes (NAU email address, science major, year of student, ethnicity, gender, and age).

The survey was distributed to 140 students and collected on the campus of NAU either through an online Google Form (online survey provided through Google) or from a paper copy to the aforementioned science classrooms mentioned under Recruitment of Participants. Responses from the Likert-scale data offered a simple acknowledgement of whether or not students had an initial recognition of the topics presented to them. Again, the survey was used for the purpose of recruiting potential participants for the more in-depth focus group sessions. The goal was to have at least 75 prospects for the focus groups so that way I had plenty of qualified participants to randomly select from. Non-seniors, graduates, incomplete surveys, and non-science majors were recognized as automatic removals prior to the first phase of data analysis (screening).

~Data analysis I~Survey responses

In order to analyze students’ responses with minimal variability of interpretation, I reached out to a colleague of mine who is a student within my masters program and her name is Tallie Segel. Since Tallie and I are familiar with similar concepts from within our program I thought it would be appropriate to get her interpretation of the data so that her and I can discuss if we see things in a similar way. I thought Tallie would be a good fit to assist me as she is outspoken and will challenge me if she thinks I am missing something. For example, in the open-ended responses there is room for interpretation and within that space Tallie and I would discuss the features and characteristics in order to make an appropriate determination of the response. I thought that Tallie would also be a good fit to help me within the focus groups as I will discuss in a little bit.

After receiving permission from five professors who were willing to offer the voluntary survey in their classrooms, I distributed said survey to approximately 140 students. Out of the 140 surveys that were distributed (paper and electronic copies), 103 were returned for data analysis. My colleague and I processed each survey by removing third-year students (non-seniors), graduate students, non-science majors, and incomplete surveys. This left us with 71 remaining surveys of students who were in their senior year and majoring in a discipline of science. We then went through and disqualified those who did not have an Agree/Strongly Agree response to the first two prompts or did not have features listed for the third prompt of at least one topic. This left us with 55 potential participants from the desired population which was below our goal. Since the number of potential focus group participants was lower than expected, my colleague and I discussed the feasibility and relevance of including qualified third-year students as a backup in case I fell short of acquiring the required amount needed for the focus groups (specifically, 18 qualified students). I ultimately decided that having third-year students as a backup would be a good idea since they would be best suited to answer questions regarding what they have been exposed to in their science classrooms in relation to the environmental topics that were introduced in the survey. After emailing 71 prospects, 55 seniors and 16 juniors, I received responses from only ten students who were interested in participating in the focus group sessions. 

An email exchange took place between myself and the ten prospects who expressed an interest in the focus group sessions. Due to scheduling conflicts, five students were not able to meet at the same time and place as the others after multiple dates and times were offered. This resulted in the scheduling of one session with two students and another session with three students for a total of five students. Since I did not offer an incentive outside of pizza and juice, and the timing of data collection being so close to the students’ finals week, I had to rely on volunteers and that may very well have also led to the low turnout. Despite having a low response rate, and having limited time and resources to recast another survey, I continued forward in conducting the focus groups sessions.

~Data collection II~Focus groups

I decided to use focus groups as my main process of inquiry as it opened a space for a variety of viewpoints to come together within a vocal synthesis of ideas and expressions. Rather than conducting individual interviews, I felt focus groups would give students an environment free of the intimidations that can come with one-on-one interviews. Questions for the focus groups were designed in consultation with my chair, Dr. Nora Timmerman, and my colleague, Tallie. An interview guide approach was used as a way of structuring the questions so that flexibility within the interviewing process could take place by the rewording or re-sequencing of questions to better fit the comfortability of the students being interviewed (Fraenkel et al., 2012). Both sessions lasted about an hour so as to not overly fatigue each of the participants.

Each session was audio recorded with the students’ full acknowledgement that any information would be collected and processed solely by me and my colleague, Tallie. I offered each student a piece of paper and a pencil so they could write down any ideas they may have had that they could revisit at any point during the interview. I also brought pizza and juice to both sessions so that students who were hungry could comfortably eat and become a part of the conversation.

The first session (Focus Group 1), was held on the campus of NAU in Cline Library with my colleague, myself, and the two students. Student 1 (Andrea) was a 21-year-old female majoring in the discipline of hydrogeology and in her fourth year as an undergraduate. Student 2 (Philip) was a 34-year-old male majoring in chemistry and in his fifth year. Both students were of White ethnicity. The session lasted 54 minutes and 49 seconds.

The second session (Focus Group 2), was also held on the campus of NAU in Cline Library with my colleague, myself, and the three other students. Student 3 (Jenna) is a 22-year-old Hispanic (or Latina) female in her fifth year double-majoring in biology and chemistry. Student 4 (Bonnie) is a 21-year-old White female in her fourth year majoring in biology as well. Student 5 (Tara) is a 21-year-old White female in her fourth year and majoring in biology along with the other two. This session ran 56 minutes and 4 seconds. 

~Data analysis II~Focus groups

I examined data from the focus group transcripts using a constant comparison analysis (CCA). Rather than conceptualizing the data during the research process to see what themes (and theory) emerge, I am using a pre-existing theoretical framework (Blum’s steps of moral perception) to categorize and compare responses within the data. In order to perform CCA, I used the procedure from Onwuegbuzie et al. (2009) that they lay out as three distinct phases of coding: 1) open coding–code phrases, statements, and words into various conceptual headings (potential themes), 2) axial coding–group conceptual headings into categories (moral perception framework), and 3) selective coding–develop overarching themes to then write my results and synthesis on. This method of analysis helped me compare data within each group and across-groups in searching for themes. During my analysis I met with my chair and my colleague to go over the coding process so as to get multiple viewpoints on the interpretation of the data as a way of minimizing bias.

I chose to record my focus group sessions as audio files so I could later transcribe the discussions into a word document that would then be used for data analysis. I made use of several technologies which included Dragon Dictate for Mac, Apple Quicktime, and NVivo for Mac (data analysis software). I transcribed both audio recordings into a word document using the Dragon Dictate software. This allowed me listen to each focus group session from my recording device (my iPhone) and repeat what I was hearing into a microphone that is linked to the Dragon Dictate software on my computer. Once that process was completed I went back and re-listened to each recording to correct any typographical errors, to properly identify who the speaker was, and to acknowledge periods where the audio was inaudible. Once this was finished I was then ready to begin coding inside of the NVivo for Mac software.

Once I loaded both transcripts (Focus Group 1 and Focus Group 2) into the NVivo for Mac software, I began dissecting and coding the text into different Nodes (NVivo’s terminology for labels). I also created Cases (student profiles) for each of the participants so that I could identify who said what. I used the names “Student 1”, “Student 2”, and so on as identifiers in place of the student’s real name so that the results would protect their privacy and confidentiality.

Within NVivo, I went through an initial round of coding to see where I could identify text that represented any of the three steps of moral perception that were laid out earlier in this chapter and more in-depth in the Theoretical Framework chapter. I created the following Nodes as categories: MPS1 Moral Situations (perceptual particularity, particularistic attitude, and detail particularity), MPS2 Features, MPS3 Principle Implementation. This process allowed me to distinguish any evidence related to the participant’s moral perception that I found relevant. Within NVivo, the Detail View and Coding Lines features allowed me to cross compare each of the moral perception steps among all five participants for continuity in my conceptual interpretation of responses. As I compared these categories between the participants within, and among, each focus group, I extracted what I found to be themes that had emerged.

I began the initial coding phase through the process of open coding and axial coding. Through open coding, I analyzed the data to see if moral perceptions existed by simply chunking data under the alias designated for each student or by marking what I found as relevant material under the heading “moral perceptions”. When the time came to conduct the axial coding process, I went through what I perceived as material related to moral perceptions and categorized them under the three steps. Table 4.1 shows the coding framework and rubric that helped group participants’ responses for further comparison.

I ran a cross-referencing procedure within NVivo known as a matrix coding query to compare responses among participants. Through this process I compared the categorical coding under the three steps of moral perception to see if responses were adequate for the purposes of this study. After careful analysis and consideration, I determined that the categorizing of data was sufficient to begin selective coding in order to develop themes. 

The selective coding process began by running several query processes within NVivo for each of the focus groups to see what themes would emerge out of the data. For each focus group, I compared each step of the moral perception framework with each of the conceptual components to identify commonalities among responses. I then combined both focus groups together and ran the same analysis to look for overarching themes. Since the theming of data starts to reveal answers toward my initial research questions, I have saved those results for the following chapter, Findings.

~Triangulation of Coding

I went through two coding cycles to establish fit and appropriateness in determining the credibility of my data analysis. I did this by coding and recoding the raw data until passages emerged as an appropriate fit under each step of moral perception that I would then compare for emerging themes. The only exception is when I asked my secondary research question where I looked for an overlying theme without any attachment to their moral perceptions. 

4.3 Protection of human rights

The privacy and confidentiality of each student was maintained by me and my colleague. All surveys, transcripts, and audio recordings were held solely by me on either my password-protected personal computer or within my lock-protected office space. Only my colleague and I had access to students’ information so that privacy of data was ensured within the confines of this study. I recorded each focus group session with my iPhone. After each session concluded, I transferred the mp3 file to my password-protected computer then deleted the mp3 file from my iPhone.

During the distribution of the surveys, a letter of consent was read before each class so that students were made aware of the voluntary nature of this study. A letter of consent was also stated at the beginning of each focus group to inform participants that any information disclosed within the focus group sessions was to be kept confidential and not to be shared beyond the group interview. Since the survey data was partially recorded via electronic submission, all information was exported from the online Google Form as a CSV file and kept on my password-protected personal computer. For the paper copy version of the survey, once collected the surveys were kept in a folder and secured in my possession. The audio recordings will not be offered to the participants as there will be multiple members within a focus group giving personal information and I did not want that information made available outside of the focus group sessions.

All of the collected data will be stored for a minimum of three years after the completion of the study in my personal possession as mandated by NAU’s Institutional Review Board (IRB). After that time all data will be permanently deleted using Apple OS X's "Secure Empty Trash" function completely erasing information from the hard drive of my computer. Also at that time, all online surveys through the Google Form feature will be permanently deleted from my NAU Google Drive (this is where Google stores any Google Docs, Google Forms, etc.). No identifying information will be included in the final analysis and synthesis written in this thesis as each student will be given a fictitious first name (e.g., someone with the name John Smith will be given a name of Student A).

4.4 Limitations

4.4.a Restraints of data collection and analysis

One of the biggest limitations that comes with attempting to observe an individual’s moral perceptions is that unless a moral situation is actually presented to the participant, it will be difficult to assess which features an individual would recognize as moral when discussing hypothetical scenarios. This means that within the focus group sessions students will be reflecting on the ideas that are presented to them in the questions rather than being presented with a real experience related to climate change. For example, students reflected on how society’s use of science impacts climate change through a question I ask but they are not being sent to an African country in civil war with one of its neighbors because of climate change drying up crops and causing forced migration to neighboring areas (Parenti, 2012). 

Another limitation that needs to be addressed is that although I used a screening process in helping find participants for the focus groups, that does not mean that those that I left out did not have something meaningful to add to the discussion. For example, just because a student might have answered disagree on the question of whether or not they had a conversation on a given planetary boundary in a classroom does not necessarily mean that they did not have some kind of learning experience elsewhere on campus. There is a broad range of influences into a person’s moral perception of a given situation and this limitation may hold pertinent information.

I am also limited by the sample size of the survey and focus group participants since I evaluated only a hand-full of students compared to the entire population of all college science students. Further limiting my study is that I had originally planned on at least 18 students for the focus group sessions but due to insufficient incentives I was only able to recruit a total of five students and that greatly reduced the amount of data available for analysis. Since I am not doing a full-scale analysis of the entirety of NAU’s science programs (which includes several science disciplines beyond those considered for this thesis), it must also be recognized that students may have had other influences to their moral perceptions beyond anything that was discussed within the focus group sessions.

Executing this type of methodology can be tricky in the sense that I did not design the moral perception framework therefore there is an added layer of interpretation between how Blum (1994) would apply his work and my understanding and translation of the data. However, I did take time to reflect on Wilber’s (2006) Integral Theory work in that I need to be mindful that in my first-person perspective I am making claims based upon a third-person objectification of each of the student’s responses with little context of their first-person experiences, interpretations, communication. I also need to be mindful that any cultural references or assumptions need to be sensitized in the same manner. For example, if Student 1 makes the claim “large corporations misuse science”, I need to recognize that I do not have a frame of reference for which particular large corporation is being referred to nor what “misuse” means without further contextualizing. 

4.4.b Role of the researcher

One last point worth mentioning is that I am bound by my own perspectival limitations and biases. Since I did graduate from NAU with a science degree, I have my own experience seeing a lack of moral and ethical conversations in the classroom and this could potential create a bias that I will otherwise not see. However, I do recognize that other students have not had the same experiences as me. Also, since NAU does not mandate any guidelines that include moral and ethical considerations into their curriculum (at least those as stringent as the SSI framework), this does not mean that the entirety of all faculty leave out at least some sense of morality within their teaching. 

Additionally, I will have my own particularities that form my interpretations of the focus group data. Because of this fact, any conclusions or themes that are made should be questioned from the reader of this thesis to determine for one’s self if the information given makes logical sense with minimal bias. Any results or findings will be explored in further detail within the Discussion chapter to hopefully shine light on any blindspots I will have had.

Chapter conclusion

Within this chapter I discussed the methods I felt were appropriate in helping answer my research questions. The survey helped me to concentrate the focus group discussions by finding an initial similarity in how students understood the subject matter. The focus group sessions helped me to engage in a dialogue that explored what students thought were morally relevant features to what they perceived as a moral issues. In the following chapter I discuss the results from using this methodological approach.

Chapter 5 Findings 

Overview

In this chapter I will cover the results that came from data collection and analysis. My findings from the results centered around three moral themes that help to answer my primary research question: In what ways do college-level science students perceive the moral dimensions surrounding society’s use of science in relation to environmental crises? After the three moral themes are discussed I will briefly look at the findings that help to answer my secondary research question: How do students relate their moral perceptions to their college education? Although climate change was the topic that both focus groups were initially centered on, students quickly branched out to discuss some of the uses of science in more broad contexts. All three moral perception steps have been laid out in this chapter with examples given for each. The three factors of Step 1 that were talked about in the Theoretical Framework chapter have also been included to help give a better understanding of the particularities that each student possesses. 

5.1 Thematizing of data

While evaluating data from both focus groups through a constant comparison analysis, I found three emerging moral themes that each group focused their responses on. The following are the three moral themes that I found relevant toward answering my primary research question: 1) There is something wrong with the way science is communicated from science to non-science groups, 2) Misusing science for private benefit is not right, and 3) It is important for people to comprehend sustainability along different scales of understanding and action. Within these three moral themes lie indicators that students are perceiving moral dimensions surrounding society’s use of science and there are some pretty clear examples of what it is that they see as being morally significant. To help illustrate this, Table 5.1 demonstrates some exemplars that offer us an idea of what is being morally perceived and which steps of moral perception students’ responses fall under. I will explain in more detail the connections between the students’ responses and the moral perception framework in the following section.

5.2 Moral themes and findings

In order to discuss what I found as the moral themes that emerged from the data I analyzed, I will quickly restate the three steps of moral perception and the ideas behind them. Within Step 1 of moral perception, recognizing a situation as one that is moral, an individual would initiate a process where particular features of a situation are congealing as ones that have a moral sense but are not yet determined as explicitly moral. The idea here is not that someone would instantly think “oh hey, I find myself in a moral situation” but rather that a process begins where an individual focuses their attention to the situation within a moral context. The initiation of one or more of three factors that make up Step 1 would focus an individual’s attention on features of that situation. The first factor, perceptual particularity (PP), is when specific features become aware to the individual as something that may violate or implicate their principles. The second factor, particularistic attitude (PA), is the outlook that an individual brings into every situation they enter into; ergo if I hold an outlook that we live in a world where gender injustices exist and are common then I would be sensitive toward seeing those features more than someone that does not hold the same attitude as we both go about our day. The third factor, detail particularity (DP), can be thought of as a particular level of familiarity an individual has in recognizing moral features; so if I have several direct experiences dealing with and resolving issues of gender bullying then I am more familiar with the many forms and levels those situations can exhibit.

Step 2 of moral perception builds off of Step 1 in that once an individual becomes familiar enough to see that the situation they are perceiving is a moral one then the features that are recognized are more firmly categorized and prioritized based on the principles an individual holds for themselves; Blum (1994) refers to these as morally significant features. Step 3 of moral perception is when an individual makes a conscious decision, based on the deliberation of morally significant features, on what the correct course of action should be and this may entail something active or inactive depending on what is determined to be most appropriate.

While analyzing data from both focus groups I found phrases that seemed to fit each of the three steps of moral perception including examples of the three factors associated with Step 1. While reviewing the categorization of phrases within the three steps of moral perception I noticed commonalities among participants’ responses that seemed to center around the three moral themes mentioned earlier. In the following subsections I will provide the moral theme, examples of phrases that align with the moral perception framework, and commentary of the connections I found in the responses to be relevant in addressing my research questions. It is important to note that some phrases may be used multiple times depending on how it relates to the moral theme. For example, if a student were to say, “I think big oil companies manipulate science to benefit their profit margins but we never discussed that in any class”, I might see two potential problems being discussed in that big oil companies are misusing science and that their education is not providing them with an understanding of the morality of how science can be misused in such a manner.

5.2.a Moral theme 1: There is something wrong with the way science is communicated from science to non-science groups

One of the moral themes I found while analyzing data from both focus groups was based primarily on responses from Andrea in Focus Group 1 and Jenna and Bonnie from Focus Group 2. All three of these participants converged rather strongly on the idea that there is a concerning problem when science is not properly communicated from science to non-science groups, and that this can lead to a misuse and misunderstanding of scientific findings. As I sat and reviewed the moral perception framework along with the transcripts from both focus groups I started to analyze what students were saying that matched with the three steps of the moral perception framework. I was looking for evidence that students were able to go beyond a simple recognition of a moral situation to something that would indicate a deeper meaning that might possibly lead to a course of action. Of all the participants’ responses from each moral theme I found, Andrea offered the best demonstration of how someone can express evidence leading to each of the moral perception steps. Using Andrea’s responses from this theme, I will show how she initially recognized this problem as one that is moral, which features she saw as morally significant, and what she decided to do about the problem as a way to show what I was looking for from each participant. After I conclude with Andrea’s responses I will then complete my analysis for this moral theme by discussing what I found from the rest of the participants that will help to provide answers toward my research questions.

~Example of moral perception Step 1 (PP, PA, DP), Step 2, and Step 3: Andrea

When asked what about science drew her interest into getting a college degree Andrea said her major was hydrogeology but that for her graduate degree she wants to switch things up and go into policy and management. Within the first factor of Step 1 in the moral perception framework, perceptual particularity, Andrea established how she was beginning to interpret the situation when she stated, “...I think it's really important we have a lot of people who produce high-quality science that have great answers but then it's really hard to translate academic sciences into real-life policy and management.” Her statement demonstrated to me that she has a perceptual particularity about the use of science in that clearly she is using language that shows her awareness and concern such as “it’s really important”, “great answers”, and “it’s really hard”. 

Still within Step 1 of the moral perception framework, Andrea then offered something that would seem to fit within the second factor which would be her particularistic attitude. She demonstrated this by fleshing out an outlook that she brings to her experiences as an up-and-coming scientist. She provided this evidence when she said, “I've been intentionally trying to spend half my time in hydrogeology, like hard science, and half my time in poli-sci. That way I’m forcing myself to cross those bridges.” Not only is Andrea continuing to express a perceptual particularity with features she is contextualizing as important but she is also demonstrating a particularistic attitude when she says she is intentionally spending half her time in the hard sciences and the other half in political science so she can build those connections between the two as she moves forward in her education and career. The third factor of Step 1 in the moral perception framework, detail particularity, was also demonstrated by Andrea when shared her experiences working for a governmental agency that is dealing with water conservation and management. She noted how that experience helped her understanding of the situation when she said:

I worked at EPA for a summer [...] They were trying to help public utilities deal with [water management]. There's this coalition of public utilities and they’re all about climate change adaption strategies for wastewater treatment and supply, and then also predicting how to deal with reduction of supply and rivers. [...] What doesn't get incorporated into actual policy and management is really frustrating for science communities because they just feel like they’re being ignored and not heard.

Within Step 1 of moral perception, recognizing a situation as one that is moral, Andrea expressed that she sees an importance in translating science into real-life policy and management, that she carries an outlook of crossing bridges between policy and good science that is produced, and that she has experience in dealing with professional organizations that work on the very issue she is bringing up as being important. All of this seems to indicate that she is recognizing a situation as one that is moral by the emphasis she places on communicating good science to policy-makers and that science communities feel ignored and not heard in that process. 

It is worth noting that Andrea was not led to discuss this emerging theme as an issue as the prompting questions were simply “Why science? What about science drew your interest into getting a degree in higher education and why did you decide to choose science as a major to complete your bachelor’s degree?” Andrea brought up this emerging theme as something that motivates her in her pursuit of not just an education but a purpose to do good things in this world. She made an interesting comment when she said she wanted to get a degree in science for the purposes of “being able to figure things out and actually having a definitive answer or solution to something or at least a path forward.” This began telling me that she is aware that the miscommunication of science can lead to significant problems and that she wants to do something about it.

Now that I have a beginning point with which to contextualize this moral theme and begin to recognize how an individual initiates their moral perception, I will now look at how Andrea’s responses deepen into more clearly defined features within Step 2 of the moral perception framework. In Step 2 Andrea more explicitly stated what she saw as morally significant features of this particular moral theme when she stated:

Because the good thing about science is that you have people who go far left with it and then you have people who go far right with it and then you have people who are like “no no no” like “we need to look at everything together” and then you can sort of find the middle ground with that, that's like the actual truth, it's not just being pulled in one direction. [...] Or when you're in your silo, your little science silo, it's really hard to understand the policy and management side. When you're in your policy and management side you're like “why don’t they produce this?!" and the scientists are like “well we can’t produce that, that's crazy”.

Within this passage Andrea begins to more explicitly lay out what she sees as being wrong in how science is miscommunicated and what she perceives as morally significant features. She points out that science can be used in manipulative ways and that without a balanced approach in understanding the science, and applying it appropriately, it can lead to an aberration of truth. 

As Andrea continued to elaborate on what she saw as morally significant features she went further in her moral perception by offering examples that would fit into Step 3 of the moral perception framework. It is within Step 3, deciding whether to engage one’s agency toward resolving the situation, that I saw evidence of Andrea’s willingness to commit to action in what she saw as a moral situation. In her own words she said:

I'm leaving science but the reason I'm doing that is because I think it's really important we have a lot of people who produce high-quality science that have great answers but then it's really hard to translate academic sciences into real-life policy and management. [...] And then I’m gonna go to grad school for policy and management and water resources.

After Andrea explained what she saw as violating conditions against her principles of the use and communication of science she clearly stated that she wants to do something about it by leaving science in order to make connections on the policy side. Her deliberation was stated earlier when she first said she was intentionally spending half of her time in science and the other half of her time learning how policies use that information. 

~Full synthesis of participants’ responses for this moral theme

The example of Andrea that I used for this moral theme hopefully demonstrates how the moral perception framework can be identified in the context of real perceived moral issues and how the perception component of this framework varies from a superficial recognition (Step 1) to a deeper understanding of the situation (Step 2) to the point of judgment and/or action (Step 3). Although Andrea offered the most evidence that would fit within all three steps of the moral perception framework, other participants did offer notable responses that would fit within one or two of the moral perception steps. As I continued evaluating each participant to see what evidence they may show that fits within the moral perception framework, I began to see an emerging pattern in the context of a moral theme.

While evaluating data from both focus groups, I noticed that three of the five participants showed strong language indicating a moral perception response to the idea that science is being miscommunicated and causing negative effects. Andrea, Jenna, and Bonnie offered a substantial amount of feedback relevant to what they saw in the miscommunication of science and that what they saw was something that violated their principles on how science should be shared and used. All three of them expressed not only an initial recognition of a potentially dangerous situation but they were also able to offer what they perceived as morally significant features (Step 2). For example, Jenna and Bonnie laid out features that entail the importance in the general public’s understanding of scientific data by explicitly stating that there is not enough understanding from the general public to help avoid “major drawbacks” from political misuse or ignorance. What became evident was that although students showed subtle differences within their perceptual particularity, particularistic attitude, and detail particularity (Step 1), they were all able to identify morally significant features that indicated this was a real issue for them and not some superficial thought.

Although Andrea, Jenna, and Bonnie contributed the most toward this particular moral theme that emerged, it is worth noting some of the responses from Philip and Tara. When Jenna and Bonnie were initially contextualizing the problem of the miscommunication and misuse of science, Tara offered her perceptual particularity on the matter by stating, “I think the general population thinks ‘oh global climate change’ like ‘how can I affect it? It's such a problem already so why bother.’” Philip exhibited a particularistic attitude when he pointed out that scientists are not completely unaware of policy decisions and how the political system works when he said, “I don't think scientists are completely unaware of everything going on around them either.” By Philip stating this he dissented from what Andrea was suggesting in her response. And finally, Tara made a point that demonstrated her detail particularity on how she sees the science of climate change being relayed to the general public when she said “It's kind of like with Al Gore...like all his charts and everything.” This showed me that she was aware of ways that the general public was made aware of climate change but she did not offer much beyond that. It is worth noting that although Philip and Tara did not offer much on this particular moral theme that should not indicate that they did not have anything further to add to the discussion.

~Summary

While analyzing data from both focus groups, I wanted to see how students’ responses would fit within the three steps of the moral perception framework while taking note of what moral themes (or patterns) would emerge from students discussing the uses of science in society. There appears to be clear evidence that three of the participants see significantly large gaps in the understanding of science between the science community and other non-science groups as contributing features to the creation of problematic issues and misuses of science within society. Students were able to aptly describe the problem and indicate what the features were that make this an important issue for them. Not only did this theme emerge from students’ responses but within those responses there were indicators that this issue is beyond a mere superficial recognition and that at least one student was willing to change their academic pursuits for the purpose of helping bridge the communication gap between science and non-science communities.

5.2.b Moral theme 2: Misusing science for private benefit is not right

Another emerging theme that came from the data was the thought that scientific data can be manipulated and misused for private benefit. Students demonstrated several explicit examples of their moral perception on the matter mainly within Steps 1 and 2 in that they seemed to recognize and articulate a problem but seemed to lack a response that would indicate a judgment to act toward a resolution. What I found interesting as I went through the data was that although there were varying degrees in the three factors of Step 1 between all five participants, they all seemed to be able to recognize how science can be misused for private benefit. Andrea and Philip discussed how skewing data to further one’s own purpose or misrepresenting data as a way of lying is definitely wrong. In Focus Group 2, Jenna, Bonnie, and Tara spoke more anecdotally about this moral theme that appear to relate to their perceptual particularity and particularistic attitude when they discussed “big corporations”, “big companies”, and “major companies” conducting their own research and how that can lead to a corruption.

Between the two, I thought Jenna and Philip articulated their moral perception within the first step the best. Jenna displayed her perceptual particularity when she talked about big oil companies controlling scientific information. She stated, “Big oil controls all the information that goes out so you don't actually know how much of a detriment they are to tar sands and stuff like that.” She expressed that certain features to this issue can contribute toward detrimental effects on a large scale indicating a moral context but did not elaborate any further to more explicitly define what “controlling the information” means. Still within the first step of moral perception, Jenna continued to express a particularistic attitude about this issue when she stated, “Because you can easily just withhold the bad information and only give off maybe the slightly good information about like...your new car. [...] Yeah it is what you collected but you’re also withholding it. Holding the bad stuff.” All of this information suggests to me that Jenna has a vague understanding that there is an issue to address when science is misused but because she did not more strongly put into detail which features were more specifically harmful, I did not associate her response within Step 2 of the moral perception framework.

Philip showed an initial recognition that science being misused is a bad thing and he offered a morally significant feature that elaborated on his concern. He began by expressing a perceptual particularity that echoed Andrea’s statement that data can be manipulated and misused when he expressed, “I think you [Andrea] said you can skew the data where [...] the other side is saying, ‘No this really isn’t happening. There's not really a problem here it’s just a cycle.’” He then expressed a particularistic attitude when he said it is unethical “to use data or skew data to further your own purpose.” This outlook seemed to directly indicate that he holds values that science should not be misused and that there would be cause for concern if the science itself were to be manipulated for some kind of private gain. Philip then went on to offer some background in his detail particularity of how science can be misused when he stated:

...in history we talked about it all the time though in, y’know, how you portray your primary data can totally skew what…you can put your own influence into everything really easily and that’s why we say that “history is written by the victor” kind of thing.

Philip demonstrated that what he discussed in his history class gave him an idea of how data can be used within power structures. I thought this was interesting as Philip was the only one to contextualize this issue of misusing science within a historical narrative.

~Summary

In this moral theme students showed a fairly articulated recognition that science being used in manipulative ways is a bad thing yet their responses were mainly categorized within the first two steps of the moral perception framework. All five students saw the misuse of scientific information as an issue to be concerned about. Interesting to note that although Andrea and Jenna were not in the same focus group together, both of them discussed the role that oil companies play in climate change and how those companies use information to their advantage. Andrea made a more general statement about oil companies that indicated to me that she was making an initial recognition of the issue (Step 1) while Jenna laid out some characteristics that support Andrea’s statement. This moral theme offered many recognitions and features of a problem that students felt passionately about that indicated to me a pattern had emerged. Unlike the other two moral themes, the language that students used within their recognition of this issue was more judgmental with words like “sick”, “unethical”, and “detriment”. Despite what appears to be an obvious recognition of this moral theme from all five participants, there did not appear to be a way to make the situation better within each of the participant’s responses which led me to believe I did not see any evidence that students were willing to act in a manner that would place their responses within the third step of the moral perception framework. This may or may not indicate that they could come up with a resolution but it certainly appeared as though they had not given this moral theme much thought outside of our discussion within the focus groups.

5.2.c Moral theme 3: It is important for people to comprehend sustainability along different scales of understanding and action

Another moral theme that emerged from the data centered around the majority of students having difficulty relating the issue of climate change between personal, communal, societal, and global scales of understanding. Interestingly, each student discussed a level of awareness that they were familiar with yet three of them struggled in connecting it to other scales. For example, Focus Group 1 seemed to struggle in connecting a global understanding of climate change down to local levels while Focus Group 2 focused more on personal and local levels without much mention of a global understanding.

Within Focus Group 1, Andrea and Philip both explicitly stated that they do not connect an issue such as climate change down to local levels. Andrea gave a statement where she laid out part of the problem that she sees when there is not an understanding among various levels of awareness. In her words:

Because like what you were saying, everything's on sort of a global scale so in your own head you're like “okay well if it’s happening globally other people are doing stuff" or like "I don't need to do that" and like even me I'm a water person but like there's no way you're going to catch me taking a three minute shower...type of a thing, and so when it’s not on a community scale or on a personal scale it's really hard to relate to and then to change because I...really what you’re talking about is changing habits and changing lifestyles to be more sustainable and to sort of be taking in those climate change things in your own mind and processing them then manifesting them in your own daily life. But if you don't have a way to relate to it personally or even like your community it’s really really hard to be like “oh I have to recycle this because...climate change.” And then it becomes so vague that it’s…taking action is hard.

In this response I see Andrea exhibiting a perceptual particularity and a particularistic attitude indicative of challenges that arise when translating one scale of understanding to another. This response echoed Philip’s struggles as well as he stated:

...it's hard to see your focus down onto a smaller level sometimes...like, I wouldn't think about what I would do in one community but looking at a general overall effect on the earth and global community is kind of the focus of everything I’ve ever seen.

Both Philip and Andrea demonstrated that their moral perception of climate change rested on a global understanding of the issue yet both of them explicitly stated that behavioral changes and personal involvement seem like a distant idea. It should be restated that each of the participants for the focus group showed in the original survey that they had some baseline understanding of climate change. 

Although Philip noted that he had not really given much thought to how things connect on the issues of climate change between varying scales of understanding, Bonnie did offer a response that seemed to add articulation to what Philip was saying. In her perceptual particularity, I found Bonnie contextualizing what she sees around the campus of NAU as an indication of her making connections between what is practiced right in front of her at the university and what the community of Flagstaff embodies as sustainable practices. In her own words Bonnie stated the following:

And I think just being at NAU we have that sort of mindset we have a lot of green buildings and trash compactors and stuff like that. So I think it's a community thing in Flagstaff too. [...] I mean, in a community I think it would definitely be eye-opening for people to come to a practice that’s built sustainably. I think a lot of people don’t even know about that.

The connection I see Bonnie making is when she stated that it would be eye-opening for a community to see sustainability out in the open as a valuable practice especially when she suggests that people do not know what practices are underway. What I also found interesting was a response she gave that indicated to me a particularistic attitude. She stated that within her ethnic studies courses she became aware to how cultures around the world view sustainability. She demonstrated what I interpreted as a pretty clear outlook when she said:

So like we take ethnic study courses to learn about other cultures so we’re not so self-centered, one-sided, only us, our background, and that’s like a global thing, right? You learn about cultures in Asia, you learn about cultures in Africa, you know what's going on today I just think that it's almost the same thing as sustainability as something global that is happening to everyone just like there's different cultures around the world I just think it's like the same thing.

Of all of the participants’ responses that relate to this emerging moral theme, Bonnie was the only one who demonstrated what those connections would look like in relating their personal lives to a more global understanding and seeing this as a course of action. Bonnie went on to explicitly state that she would like to open her own dentist practice one day and through the architecture of the building be able to “[incorporate] those sustainable attributes just by telling people when they come in.” This seemed to me to be an indication that Bonnie understands the urgency in sustainable living and wants to do her part. Conversely, Tara stated “Maybe not be so direct like you two [Jenna and Bonnie] but I do my own little bit and know that I'm making a difference. One by one.” I bring up Tara because for her she only thought of the issue of climate change on a personal level but did not extend much beyond that. I did not find any responses that would indicate an action that could be taken to remedy this gap in connecting varying scales of understanding so that an individual can see the global effects of something like climate change while relating it to their personal and daily lives.

~Summary

Students expressed a recognition that a struggle exists in connecting the understanding of climate change among various levels of awareness and action. Even within their own statements they seem to inadvertently make some of those connections as they move within Step 1 and Step 2 but they do not seem to see how those connections are made. For example, Andrea and Philip thought of climate change in a global context but struggled in connecting the problem to a more community and/or personal level. Bonnie, however, having a more comprehensive understanding of climate change through a sustainability class she completed, demonstrated that she feels she can act and make a difference by opening her own business one day using sustainable practices as a way of helping educate others on what can be done at a community level. Throughout all three steps of moral perception, this pattern of having difficulty relating scales of understanding and action were consistent among and across both focus groups.

5.3 Moral dimensions of society’s use of science within science classrooms

When pursuing responses to answer my secondary research question, I did not use the moral perception framework and instead asked direct questions to see if they would attribute the features of our discussion to similar experiences within their classrooms. My secondary research question states, how do students relate their moral perceptions to their college education? I asked qualifying questions to answer my secondary research question and students responded by saying they did not experience any sort of explicit moral focus within any of their classes for their degree. 

Although Andrea and Jenna have had meaningful experiences outside of the classroom that taught them about the seriousness of climate change, water conservation, and sustainability in a general sense, both of them stated that they did not experience explicit focuses on the moral aspects of how society uses science within any of their core science classes while attending college. Andrea stated that her classwork did not have these focuses when she said: 

It wasn't in class, it was like if you had a professor who really cared about something like that they would preach a little every now and again. But it didn’t come from every professor and it definitely wasn’t a part of any kind of curriculum.

Jenna also contributed a similar sentiment when she stated, “The more I think about my classes the less I...actually the more I realize they don't talk about sustainability and the applications of it.” Tara also said that she did not experience a focus of this type within any curriculum she had taken. 

Each participant from both focus groups agreed that having mandatory classes that focus on society’s use of science and the implications of moral issues that arise out of environmental crises would be a good thing for universities to do but that right now that is not what is being offered. Bonnie offered a comment that summed up the sentiment shared by the participants in her group and Focus Group 1 when she said:

I basically learned everything from that [global sustainability] class along with like ecology and soil ecology and stuff like that. [...] Yup, social impacts, economic impacts I mean it's a great class and I think it's considered one they don't keep permanent which I hope they keep it because it’s really awesome. I learned a lot from it.

When thinking of how our conversation was bringing about moral dimensions of the issues we were discussing only Bonnie had taken an elective course that contributed to her perception and understanding of the issue of climate and the more broad topic that arose of society’s use of science. Philip offered a similar response and indicated he thought mandatory classes focused on what is important should be centered around current issues. He seemed concerned that without such a focus it would inhibit students from getting a clear understanding of what is going on in the world. He also showed concern that without a continuing focus carried throughout a science degree program that it would be difficult to see any kind of effect take place in the awareness of the student. In his own words he said, “But I think having that class one time when you’re a freshman or whatever grade it’s not gonna do a whole lot to change people or people's awareness.” Between Bonnie’s and Philip’s responses it seems that classes that focus on the kind of content we discussed were not only not mandatory but also temporary courses offered as elective classes (non-mandatory). 

Summary

Some of the assumptions I had about education and a lack of moral focuses coming into this project were confirmed by students’ responses but I did not expect there to be such strong opinion on what should be done to address those gaps in their education. I was surprised to see students suggest that having some sort of ongoing and mandatory class on sustainability and/or current issues would help them better connect how science is used in society. All of the participants, with the exception of Tara who mentioned that using the word “mandatory” might turn students off to the idea, thought having a required course that brought in more important and relevant issues for students to deliberate over would be a great thing.

Chapter conclusion

Throughout my findings for this chapter I came across three important moral themes that students expressed in their responses (Figure 5.1). Collectively within all three moral themes, students’ responses fit more within the first two steps of the moral perception framework without there being much evidence that I would categorize within the third step. Despite there not being much evidence that would suggest that students want to take direct action in resolving the issues that were brought up within the three moral themes, it became evident that all five participants do want to see science education better include ways of addressing these issues. The findings that came out of my data analysis helped me understand some of the ways that college-level science students perceive the moral dimensions surrounding society’s use of science and helped me understand how their moral perceptions connect to what they see in their college education.

Chapter 6 Discussion and Conclusion

Overview

Two research questions that led me to write this thesis: 1) In what ways do college-level science students perceive the moral dimensions surrounding society’s use of science in relation to environmental issues?, and 2) How do students relate their moral perceptions to their college education? I have used the three steps of moral perception from Blum (1994) as a lens to investigate this inquiry to see what is going through the minds of students when they are asked about society’s uses of science and a connection of such conversations to their college education. Throughout this chapter I will look at the importance of this study, the meaningfulness of my findings, the limitations of this study, and suggestions for further research.

6.1 Moral dimensions surrounding society’s use of science is lacking in science education

~Planetary boundaries, society’s use of science, and science education

When I began this study I wanted to think about how science students looked at some of the pressing global issues that we are dealing with in this time and age. I wanted to know if their education had any sort of moral influence, or at least an influence that would bring about moral discussions, of these global issues we are seeing. Connecting the role of science education of college students to the uses of science that society employs in its operation is essential to having up-and-coming decision-makers and active participants of that society understand the scale and severity that the uses of science can have. What became clear in the construction of this thesis was that much of the research that was shown in my literature review, in combination with the results of my own study, demonstrate that there is a huge deficiency in bringing about moral understandings on the uses of science.

Teaching the idea of science is one thing but having students become more aware of the construction and application of scientific knowledge is a separate matter. I am arguing that students need to learn about the consequences that come from misusing scientific knowledge so that they can avoid, to the best of their ability, adding any further contributions to the problem. If educational institutions are to offer an education in science, one that allows students to learn the moral dimensions in the uses of science, then curriculum developers will need to provide an environment that allows for dialogue where logical discussions of different ideas and opinions can take place focusing on some of the pressing global issues that have been discussed in this thesis (e.g., climate change). I think the approach to have students engage in dialogue would help address Illich’s (1971) concern that any attempt to teach science would need to be an open experience without an expected outcome as to avoid further indoctrinating students into pre-existing glorifications of science that may reinforce norms that propagate these larger issues. This means that students will be asked to think critically about their relationship to larger issues and share those ideas so that some form of perspectival awareness is brought out in deeper and more meaningful ways. 

~Why moral perception?

In doing this research I wanted to get a baseline understanding of what a typical college-level science student would morally perceive and what of those moral perceptions would be attributed to the influence of their science education. I thought the moral perception framework laid out by Blum (1994) was a sufficient way of probing students’ constructed understandings of global issues through a moral context. There were quite a few responses from participants that showed the logical progression that Blum suggests would occur as an individual advances from an initial recognition of a moral situation to a judgment of action. Students from this study showed progressions of moral perception that did indicate that on some level they recognize some of the moral dimensions of society's use of science and how that plays into these environmental crises that we are seeing unfold. Although research that is being done in this area in relation to science education is focused mainly on curriculum construction centered on moral reasoning, I feel that the moral perception framework is a great way to assess a baseline understanding of where science students are at in their outlook prior to any specific focus in the classroom. 

Enabling science departments to alter their programs of study to include explicit moral focuses within the required coursework will not be easy. Firstly, there is a question of whether resources and political will exist to enact new paradigmatic approaches in teaching science as many institutions adhere to primarily positivist (quantitative) methods of assessment (Tobin, 2014); this can be clearly seen by the use of the “GPA” protocol that determines a student’s academic success. Secondly, even if resources and political will were available, how can educational institutions know where students’ moral aptitude exist in order to provide curriculum that appropriately guides them toward scientifically responsible decision-making? Future research studies may want to focus on the connection between the theoretical framework of moral perception and paradigmatic research practices of constructivism (Yilmaz, 2007) and/or critical theory (McLaren, 2003) as the former could very well offer further understandings into a student’s moral interpretation of particular concepts and ideas while the latter would help address the power dynamic that is involved with large educational institutions who control the course requirements bestowed on students.

6.2 What students showed me in their moral perceptions 

When I sat down and discussed the issue of climate change with the participants of this study, I was amazed to learn that their moral perceptions of society’s use of science extends beyond any one issue into a more generalized concern in the miscommunication and misuse of science. In addition to this, I saw a fragmented understanding from students in their ability to connect how different scales of an issue (e.g., global, regional, and local factors) interchange and affect one another. Most of the moral perceptions that I found around the moral themes that emerged indicate to me that students want to care and want to be informed about issues but unless their science education provides them with an opportunity to think about these issues in any meaningful way it will be tougher for them to be well-informed and active members of society.

Students care deeply that science is either not being properly understood by the general public, and therefore creating one set of problems where the general public are not informed and therefore do not understand the scale of what is going on, or that policy-makers are not adhering to what the science is telling us, and therefore creating another set of problems where issues become heavily politicized rather than objectively resolved. Within both of these respects, students argued for more education of science but not in a way that would bog people down with technical terminology and concepts but rather in more simplistic terms so what is understood is the message that science can be used for good and bad purposes. Thinking of this brings me back to the perspectival abilities and critical thought component I discussed within my literature review as I would like to see students acquire skills that enable them to discuss real issues within an academic setting (Hodson, 1998) and learn to recognize features that do not fit within their structured “scientific” paradigm (Liu et al., 2010).

What is interesting to note is that only one student from my study, Andrea, made a conscious decision to change course in her educational path in order to address a gap that she morally perceives in the translation of science between the science community and policy-makers, and possible misuses of science that she would find morally wrong. Simonneaux (2014) speaks directly to a need for an education of this kind in that students need to familiarize themselves with real issues along a spectrum of awareness where on one end they would use a techno-scientific rationality, a rationale where epistemic values such as validity, reliability, and accuracy are used to pursue an objective answer or resolution to an issue; and on the other end they would use a critical rationality, a reflexive approach where those epistemic values are explained and discussed with the goal of creating context surrounding the issue (p. 107). To this point, Liu et al. (2010) showed results in their study that students who were non-science majors showed a better ability to reason on a given issue from multiple perspectives than science majors who demonstrated a more myopic scientific-technological understanding (p. 510). It seems as though unless students are explicitly shown how to incorporate multiple perspectives into their thinking, or in the case of Andrea making a conscious effort to understand various perspectives, they struggle in making connections on relevant and important perspectives of a given issue, as was found in my study.

Any indication that one of my participants was perceiving any sort of moral dimension around the use of science in society came from an experience that was outside of the college classroom. What I found disturbing is that the only exception to this was an elective course on sustainability that Bonnie took which she could have easily passed by, as in no way was it mandatory for her degree. This seems troubling to me that although students are having moral perceptions that indicate a sense of how science can be used for both good and bad within society, they are only learning that peripherally to their required coursework. I find the scaffolding recommendation by Lee et al. (2013) to help students broach a given issue with the purpose of creating informative dialogue as an essential key to helping resolve this missing link within science education that I, as well as others, have found.

As an example of what is missing within science education, Andrea had the ability to recognize an issue and made a conscious decision to do something about it but what is concerning is that she also explicitly stated that the type of educational content that would have enhanced her ability to better perceive the uses of science outside of the classroom never showed up as a part of any curriculum within her college education. She admits that she has intentionally tried to bridge together the hard sciences with political science yet despite her efforts to better contextualize water management in relation to climate change she said, “We just don't have those conversations. Like those conversations don't come up in class.” We now live in a world where science is becoming more and more suppressed in an attempt to withhold information from the general public and students will need to know not only how their respective careers may be affected, but also what sort of environmental and social issues will come out of such suppression. For example, newly-elected President Donald Trump’s removal of all climate change publications from government websites (Volcovici, 2017), and an attempt to dismantle the Environmental Protection Agency, will have a direct effect on Andrea’s work in water management but how will she acquire the tools necessary to do something about it? To answer this question, I come back to Simonneaux (2014) when he suggests that we need to help students be “informed citizens”. Simonneaux recommends that teaching objectives should include higher order thinking exercises where students are asked to develop informed opinions, be able to debate issues, and show responsible decision-making abilities; all with the intent of enhancing critical thought processes.

Studies have shown that when a student is involved within a social setting that enables them to actively participate in the understanding of real issues that good outcomes manifest out of a willingness to act (Bandura, 2000; Bencze et al., 2011). Other studies have shown evidence that without these sorts of focus areas on the morality involved with socioscientific issues that there is often a significant loss of student understanding, connection, and action (Lewis et al., 2006; Liu et al., 2010; Sadler, 2004). What I found most meaningful about Bonnie’s responses in general was that this one particular class on sustainability gave her a tremendous amount of motivation to share knowledge and become an active member of society in combating global climate change.

The role that students will eventually play in disseminating scientific information, and becoming practitioners of science, will have a very important and meaningful effect on how society uses, and understands, science. Will students learn how to become informed citizens and make good use of the science they produce? In the context of science education, Zeidler and Keefer (2003) say that science should be a “joint construction of scientific knowledge that is at once personally relevant and socially shared” (p. 8). According to the students from my study, no such mandatory coursework, or focus, has enabled them to consider what having a joint construction of scientific knowledge that is personally relevant and socially shared means in any significant sense by what is lacking in their education. The findings that were uncovered within students’ moral perceptions suggest that moral focuses within their science education are unsystematic and casual at best in helping them see their role in how society uses science.

6.3 Comments on Blum’s moral perception framework 

While analyzing data from both focus groups, I found it challenging to appropriately incorporate students’ responses under the different steps of the moral perception framework. If my goal is to give a true sense of a student’s moral perception, then I would need to introduce them to an explicit moral situation and record their responses, not sit every person down in a group setting to discuss a concept, or idea, of a global issue. The focus group design seemed to help students reflect with one another around the topic that was given but this may not give an accurate representation of their moral perception as I was only able to grasp onto their initial responsiveness to hypothetical dilemmas. As discussed earlier in the Theoretical Framework chapter, responsiveness can potentially reveal an empathic or compassionate concern or at the very least an indication of previous thought on the matter. I say potentially because it is only after the individual has had a moment to reflect and reason over their behavior can they determine for themselves if their response was for moral purposes or not (Blum, 1994). Given the constraints of time and the nature of asking students to reason and respond to structured questions, it may have been better to refer to Kohlberg’s stages of moral reasoning than to try and capture their moral perceptions under Blum’s framework as it would be difficult to know for sure if students’ answers would change under different circumstances or conditions. 

If we are to gain a better understanding of how and why an individual comes to the moral conclusions they do, I think we need to move beyond the moral perception framework and look at how the moral features that come into a process of deliberation are guided toward some method of application. However, if within our moral perception (which can include moral sensitivities toward particular situations or features) we simply do not see or “miss” what is in front of us then the entire process of moral reasoning will have been averted without any sense of responsibility, accountability, or ownership to a potentially moral situation. 

With all of that said, focusing on how Blum lays out the dimensions of moral perception within the three steps is something I think qualitative researchers can still make use of as the framework does allow for someone like me to explore part of that initial responsiveness that an individual would initiate once they are introduced to the problems I presented. Whether or not this would be accurate or elicit a different response if the individual were brought into a real moral situation is open for debate. 

I find it valuable that Blum’s framework opens up a space to understand the particularities of the individual and consider which attributes influence their initial recognitions of what is presented to them. For example, by considering perceptual particularity, particularistic attitude, and detail particularity within the first step, I was able to think about the descriptive nature underlying some of the details that were provided within students’ responses that helped give some indication of the lens that the individual perceives the world through. The second step helped me understand more of the conviction that an individual holds once they feel more confident that the features they perceive are, in their mind, morally significant. The third step leads me into what researchers like Kohlberg and Zeidler focus on which is moral rationality (Blum, 1994; Zeidler & Keefer, 2003). I see a benefit in using moral perception as a way of observing which characteristics an individual perceives as relevant, and then looking at how they rationalize a situation based on what they perceive.

From my discussion with participants in the study, I think students have an intrinsic desire to want to do the right thing and have others do the right thing but I think there are a lot of situations and features they are simply not familiar with on a level to begin a process of moral reasoning. Andrea, Jenna, and Bell seemed quicker to respond to a hypothetical moral situation and then engage in a process of deliberation and reasoning than did Philip or Tara. I am not making any sort of firm conclusions but Philip nor Tara gave me any sense of urgency when we discussed various issues and even as the others were becoming more alive in their engagement and motivation to discuss the issues, it did not seem like the features we were discussing resonated strongly within their awareness.

The human mind is an unbelievably complicated place of activity and trying to determine how an individual perceives morality in the world should be approached with the utmost caution. Trying to determine how and why people see the things they see requires more information than what I could gather within my focus groups having only a 1-hour interview with multiple participants present. I appreciate Blum’s work as it gives me a way of inviting an understanding of an individual’s morality out into a shared space rather than making any empirical claims based solely on observation of hypothetical situations. I found the theory of moral perception to be a valuable set of ideas worth pursuing for future research as it enabled me to consider an individual’s particularities surrounding moral issues.

6.4 Limitations of study

~Sample size of focus groups

One of the challenges of this study was that although I initially reached 140 students with the survey I was only able to gather five participants for the focus groups. In order to draw stronger conclusions from commonalities among participants' responses, I think it would have benefited the study if there were at least three separate focus groups with six participants each for a total of 18 students. What may have been a blessing in disguise is that although I had less participants, I was able to spend more time with each student to get a little deeper into their moral perceptions. What would have been ideal is if I could have spent more time with more students in order to better flesh out their outlook on the issues that are pertinent to this study.

~Design of questions for focus groups

Another issue I encountered while coding and analyzing the data was that I could have done a better job in the design of the questions so that the students would have more directly responded to each step of the moral perception framework. Blum (1994) offers several examples of identifying the particularities and characteristics of each step and by asking questions that would have more closely aligned with what would fall in those categories might have strengthened some of the results of the study. For example, I could have asked, do you see anything wrong in society’s use of science in relation to climate change? By more explicitly aligning questions to the moral perception framework it might have been easier for me to determine some level of moral relevance to the issue.

~University classroom experience

While writing this thesis, I often referred to the “classroom” experience as having an important role to play in the educational experience of the student but that should not limit what universities may be doing outside of the classroom. It should be noted that universities are not just one classroom but an experience that extends into an environment where students have everything from student clubs to extracurricular activities to one-on-one time with professors to learn and take in information. This study did not interview student clubs or search for opportunities outside of the classroom that students may have had but if I had more time and resources I would have liked to have interviewed several professors who teach within the sciences at NAU to get an idea of what else may be going on. Although what I gathered from students were their moral perceptions from their classroom experience (their required coursework), this would not necessarily mean that professors do not include some amount of ethical or moral focus within their classrooms. I want to make it clear however that I did not find any administrative requirements within the sciences that made moral focuses mandatory. This is not to say that all curriculum presented to students would lack this sort of material but it does seem uncommon.

~My own perception

Another limitation to this study is the acknowledgment that although I have worked with my chair and my colleague in analyzing the data, I did not have as many resources to go over each individual response to get different perspectives in the understanding of the students' moral perceptions. Although I do have background knowledge and familiarity with the construct of morality, it is always beneficial to have various perspectives looking at the same piece of evidence.

6.5 Suggestions for future studies

~Larger study for science administrators

I would like to see universities and colleges take the moral perception framework and build a survey (or potential interview) to give to their student body as a means of assessing a baseline understanding of their students’ moral perceptions. If we are to build a society that responsibly makes use of science and allows for a critical viewpoint of science to be discussed within the classroom, it would be important to understand what students perceive in their connection of science education and society’s use of science through a moral context. This sort of information collected from a survey or interview can help guide college administrators to include into their respective curriculums various moral topics and exercises that can help enhance how students recognize potentially moral situations and how they can possibly work toward the resolution of a given issue. The enthusiasm and motivation that came from students within my study on including such topics within the classroom definitely suggested that there is a need and desire, from students, to have moral discussions in their classrooms.

~Design a better metric for moral perception

While analyzing the data I became familiar with the NVivo qualitative analysis software and see potential in how to use that for evaluating a larger number of data from students’ responses. As I mentioned before, I think the crafting of the questions would be crucial in order to guide, but not influence, the responses of participants so that mining information can be done more efficiently. This may offer a metric for interpreting the moral perceptions of students as it would allow me to construct raw numbers of where data looks to have trends and patterns.

~Design a curriculum to enhance moral perceptions 

I think a good combination of Blum’s moral perception framework and the socio-scientific issues (SSI) platform can help guide curriculum design so that students are made aware of, and provoked to think about, concepts of science in relation to real applications of that science. The moral perception framework, even if given as a beginning-of-the-semester quiz, can help inform educators on which issues to present and how possibly to present them. It seems to me that combining these two theoretical frameworks would help enhance science education in a way that will not only benefit the student by society at large. With everything presented in this thesis, I think there is sufficient evidence to suggest that science education needs to start having some serious discussions about some serious issues.

Conclusion

As I stated in my introduction, my motivation for writing this thesis rests on my desire to gain insight and understanding into how college science students perceive the moral dimensions surrounding society’s use of science. I am still a believer that science has more benefits than costs in helping us live healthier lives and understand ourselves and the cosmos. Throughout my study I gained a tremendous amount of insight into my own morality and have connected that into how I perceive science and science education. I do think we, collectively, are misusing science in a way that has created some very big problems and I have not even addressed how science has contributed to weapons of mass destruction, space junk, the rise of political power through media, and global economic stability. For those of us focused on science education, we have work to do.

If you are reading this thesis it is probably safe to assume that you as well contribute to the problem of human-caused disturbances within Earth's planetary boundaries along with me and millions of other human beings. Proportionately speaking, just about all of us here in the United States directly contribute to the devastating effects seen around the world, and here at home, all because of our behaviors associated with consumption and waste. If we want younger generations to learn from our mistakes, then of course part of that responsibility falls within the home but another part of that responsibility falls on educational institutions as they are the ones providing the knowledge and direction for our future workforce to follow.

My moral sense of science stems from a personal judgment, or belief, that there is a right way to use science, and this would include practices that take into consideration high levels of moral perception and moral reasoning where better political, economic, social, and environmental decisions are made. If for those of us that have morally perceived these global issues I speak about to be relevant and cause for alarm, then I think we must better understand how science is taught to younger generations that are already inheriting what my generation and those before me have left for them to manage and clean up. We must act collectively but make determinations individually and this relationship between self and others, and the moral and ethical dimensions involved, is where I would like to carry my work to next within a doctoral program.

The students interviewed for this study gave me hope that younger generations are listening and do share an aspiration to make the world a better place for us all to inhabit, if only we can help show them how. I think if we could all take a moment to consider our own moral perceptions and think more deeply about what we see and how we see it might we be able to better recognize our behaviors and how that contributes to the negative consequences caused by our actions. For my part, I would like to carry everything I've learned within writing this thesis forward toward helping influence and impact science education at the collegiate level so that we teach ourselves and our students how to better recognize and reason on moral issues so that we may build more sustainable communities.

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