The Ethical Competency Development Framework

Professional ethics as a social requirement leads universities to rethink ethics education schemes in their curricula to provide graduates with expertise in the ethical exercise of their professions. This paper describes an Ethical Competency Development Framework (ECDF) that enables undergraduates to develop their skills to resolve conflicts of interest and ethical problems in their professions. After that, we examine the results of applying the ECDF framework in a learning experience called Semester i: Consolidating an IT Department. From Fall 2017 to Spring 2021 there were eight semester offerings of this learning experience involving a population of 139 students. We found that the ECDF helps students develop high-performance thinking in ethical competency. For future work, we will continue gathering data from this learning experience. We hope the ECDF framework will be a model for the development of ethics in other undergraduate programs.