Measuring Growth and Impact: Ethical Reasoning in the Information Systems Technology Field

Heightened by emerging web-based technologies through which it has become easier for anyone to engage in illegal or unethical appropriation and use another’s personal information, the debate is ongoing concerning how best to teach ethics in order to maximize its impact on learners. Currently, ethics is taught through a variety of methods using various resources. This quasi-experimental study examined the effects of ethics instruction on learning and moral development with information technology undergraduate students (N = 32) at a Midwest university. Researchers analyzed two groups: one exposed to ethics instruction through the use of case studies and the control group which did not receive direct ethics instruction in this repeated-measures design. Participants were tested using the Defining Issues Test (DIT-2) and results were analyzed using an analysis of covariance. Results demonstrated no statistically significant difference, thus indicating no difference between groups provided ethics training using case study method versus groups provided no instruction in ethics.