Developing ethical geography students? The impact and effectiveness of a tutorial-based approach

Abstract

This paper explores the effectiveness of a tutorial-based approach in supporting the development of geography undergraduates’ ethical thinking. It was found that overall the intervention had a statistically significant impact on students’ ethical thinking scores as assessed using a Meta-Ethical Questionnaire. The initiative led to a convergence of scores, having a bigger impact on those who had a relatively low score prior to the intervention. Interestingly, the approach had the biggest impact on students who self-identified as physical geographers. Unlike some previous research, there was little evidence of difference between male and female students.

Keywords:

• Ethics
• tutorial
• Meta-Ethical Questionnaire
• gender
• physical geography
• human geography

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank all of the students and staff who participated in this project. Our appreciation goes to Kim Ross who collected and analysed some of the data and significantly contributed towards the development of this project in its early stages. We would also like to thank the anonymous referees and Dr Graham Wilson for their comments and advice on earlier versions of this paper.

Funding

This work was supported by Learning and Teaching Institute at the University of Chester.

Notes

1. Physical and human geography as classified here are based on prior student experience at A-Level and how the BSc programme is constructed. These are classified as distinct from environmental geographers who work more closely with the human–environment interface.

2. Two statements addressing the purpose of ethical discussion were essentially the same statement worded differently. If there was more than one step difference in a student’s response to these two statement pairs, the response was considered invalid (Clarkeburn et al., 2003).

3. As some students’ preferences changed over the course of the year we have analysed the changes in ethical score based on both their stated preference at the beginning of the module and their preference at the end.