**5. Pilot study**

'Social and Professional Environment' is a compulsory, first-year course, in the curricula of 'Information Engineering and Management Control', and 'Accounting and Auditing' degrees at the Faculty of Economics and Business ('Facultad de Economía y Negocios', FEN) at Universidad de Chile, Santiago, Chile. This course aims that students reflect on current socio-environmental challenges in relation to their future professional occupations. Since 2013, Ethical Discernment (ED) was integrated as a transversal skill at FEN, thus it ceased being taught as a dedicated course. The ED competence is defined at FEN as *"the use of a set of criteria that guide the projection of effects and consequences in decision-making in the field academic, professional and/or labor, considering norms, values and good practices"*.

The course is focused on five main themes: 1) Sustainable Human Development, 2) Poverty and Inequality, 3) Education, 4) Citizen Participation, and 5) Multiculturalism and Gender. Critical discussion is fostered based on these themes, for which students are provided the pertaining literature. In each course topic, special attention is paid to students' ability to analyze social problems and ethical issues raised, as well as establishing links with professional practice, and proposing possible solutions to the problems. Consistently with this rationale, the analysis of ethical dilemmas is part of the course methodology.


**Table 1.** *Description of the role-playing activity based on EthicApp-RP.*


#### **Table 2.**

*List of actions prioritized by the different roles in the activity.*

Due to the COVID19 pandemic in 2020, the development of the course was faced with the challenge of maintaining the active learning methods in an online format, as these were customary in face-to-face classes. For this reason, it was decided to pilot EthicApp-RP in the course, in order to facilitate conducting role-playing activities in the third course unit. An ad hoc ethical dilemma was written, based on the challenges that the country was experiencing due to the pandemic. The dilemma closely resembled the national reality at the time of the activity.

In total, 85 students participated in the trial activities, divided into two sections of 49 and 36 students, respectively. In both sections the activity lasted one hour, however, it was conducted at different times and guided by different teachers. Participation was entirely online, with use of Cisco Webex for synchronous communication.

#### **5.1 Role-playing learning activity**

**Table 1** summarizes the steps followed in the pilot activity. Before class, the students had to study the case, which basically described the state of events in the Chilean education system in the midst of the COVID-19 crisis. In synthesis: The education system had been challenged with the need to migrate all levels of education to online formats. Adoption of online education meant that all educational levels had to sacrifice learning outcomes and contents, due to reduction of effective class time.

In the individual work phase, each student was assigned the role of a decision maker, automatically, by EthicApp-RP (see **Table 1**). According to the assigned role, each student had to prioritize a set of actions to cope with the crisis (see **Table 2**). The intent was that each student prioritized the actions considering resource limitations, and the interests of the stakeholders they represented and society as a whole. Next, the 'Expert Groups', 'Mixed Groups' and 'Plenary Discussion' phases ensued.

#### **6. Quantitative results**

The entirety of the cohort, i.e., 85 students, connected to EthicApp-RP at the beginning of the activity. However, two students entered late and were not assigned to a group, thus only 83 participated in the first phase, and 81 thereby submitted their response. In the role assignment performed by EthicApp-RP in phase 1

#### *A Social Platform for Fostering Ethical Education through Role-Playing DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.96602*

(i.e., 'Individual response'), there were between 13 and 15 students assigned to each role. The roles were assigned to the students in the following quantities: Secretary of Education to 15 students, Secretary of Finance to 14, Head of Higher Education Students to 14, Parents Association to 13, Association of School Principals to 13, and Teachers' Union to 14 students.

In phase 2 (i.e., 'Expert Groups'), 81 students participated. In the first section, the groups were more numerous, composed of 7 to 9 students, while in the second section, the groups involved from 5 to 7 students. Finally, in the third phase (i.e., 'Mixed Groups'), 80 students submitted responses.

Regarding chat messages, a significant increase was observed between phases 2 and 3 (see **Figure 3**-left), especially in the roles of Secretary of Education, Secretary of Finance, and Head of Higher Education Students. This is an expected behavior in mixed groups, since in previous studies it has been determined that in groups where there are different points of view, the discussion is greater than in groups with more homogeneous views [32].

The distributions of chat messages per student considering the different roles follow a similar trend to that observed with respect to the totality of messages by role (see **Figure 3**-right). In particular, in phase 3, certain outliers are observed for the roles of Secretary of Education and Secretary of Finance.

Through the successive phases of the activity, all roles placed action A3 – 'Devices and Connectivity' as the first priority, and the last priority was that of A6 – 'University Funding' (see **Figure 4**). It can be seen that the priorities evolved throughout the three phases; however, the first three priorities remained relatively stable. Apart from the first priority already mentioned, in second place of priorities, the action A4 – 'Teacher Salaries' dominated in the three phases, and in the third place, there was a similar number of preferences for A5 – '11-12th Grade Tutors', A4 – 'Teacher Salaries', and A2 – 'Special Educators'.

**Figure 5** shows Sankey networks depicting how first priority preferences evolved in each of the roles through the three phases. It can be seen that the first priority varies according to each role. Notably, in the first phase, the first priority

**Figure 3.**

*At the left, number of chat messages per role and phase. At the right, distribution of chat messages per role and phase.*

**Figure 4.**

*Frequency of action rankings per phase.*

**Figure 5.**

*Sankey charts depicting the evolution of the first priority chosen by students with different roles throughout the activity.*

for the secretaries of Education (a) and Finance (b) is distributed in four actions. In contrast, for Teachers' Union and Parents Association, the action A3 – 'Devices and Connectivity' clearly dominates. In the case of Principals, there are three priority actions, and in the case of the Head of Higher Education Students, action A3 is dominant, and three other actions have less weight.

In the second phase, of expert groups, the first priority was changed in each of the roles. In the case of the Secretary of Education, A3 starts to acquire major importance. In the case of the Secretary of Finance, A1 – 'Hygiene and Security' acquires much greater importance than in the first phase. For the Teacher's Union role, A3 increases its importance, with only one participant who maintained their preference for A2 – 'Special Educators'. All of the students with the role of Parents Association representatives prioritized A3 first. The representatives of the Association of School Principals maintained the same actions in first priority, increasing in importance A1. Finally, for Head of Higher Education Students, A3 increases its importance and a student appears prioritizing A1 first.

In the third phase, only the role of Secretary of Finance maintains a prioritization where A1 and A3 are equally divided in first place. For all other roles, action A3 takes on the highest importance.

#### **6.1 Technical usability of EthicApp-RP**

To determine the students' perception of technical usability of EthicApp-RP, the SUS questionnaire, based on 10 Likert 1–5 scale items [36] was administered in online format to the participating students, [57]. A total of 39 responses were gathered, of which two responses were ruled out as invalid, thus 37 responses are considered in this analysis. The distribution of scores is shown in **Figure 6**. The mean score was 78.6/100 (SD = 13.8), the minimum was 47.5 points, the median 75, and the maximum 100. Only four students (11% of responses) gave a score lower than 68, which is considered average usability according to [36].

*A Social Platform for Fostering Ethical Education through Role-Playing DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.96602*

#### **Figure 6.**

*Distribution of EthicApp-RP SUS scores.*


#### **Table 3.**

*EthicApp-RP Usability Scale results.*


#### **Table 4.**

*Results of the PMLQ instrument, by construct.*

**Table 3** shows the items from the SUS questionnaire, with their respective descriptive statistics. Students consider the use of the relevant tool in university courses (question 1). On the other hand, it is observed that the application was, on average, easy to learn to use (question 3), without the students having received training prior to the activity carried out. Also, the functions are easy to remember (question 4) and understand (question 5) for most students.

#### **6.2 Pedagogical usability of EthicApp-RP**

The evaluation of Pedagogical Usability, that is, the appraisal of the pedagogical qualities of the design and the use of EthicApp-RP, was carried out through an adaptation of the Pedagogically Meaningful Learning Questionnaire (PMLQ ) [55], with a total of 34 Likert items in a 1–5 scale, [58]. This instrument allows evaluating pedagogical usability considering a series of criteria, as shown in **Table 4**. PMLQ was applied in conjunction with SUS, hence the same number of valid responses was obtained, i.e., 37 out of a total of 39.

It is observed that in every construct the average score obtained is in within the range of 4–5, which meets the pedagogical usability goals established at the outset of EthicApp-RP's development process.

### **7. Qualitative results**

Students' written justifications in the EthicApp-RP activity were analyzed for complexity of ethical reasoning. For this, the rubric of the Association of American Colleges and Universities (AAC&U) on Ethical Reasoning was used [59]. This rubric was preferred, since it was developed by teams of faculty experts representing colleges and universities across the United States, "*through a process that examined many existing rubrics and related documents for each learning outcome and incorporated additional feedback from faculty*" [59]. A specific criterion of the rubric, namely 'Evaluation of Different Ethical Perspectives/Concepts' was considered for rating all students' justifications (see **Table 5**). These were 1465 in total, considering the three first phases of the activity, and that the students had to justify the hierarchical ordering of six actions.

Each of the students' justifications was analyzed and scored by one of the researchers. Later, another researcher assigned scores and the differences were discussed. Only in four cases out of 717 registered justifications it was necessary to make an adjustment to the assigned score.

Students who were assigned a score of 1 to their justifications (46%), normally used the same measure as justification or stated comments as 'it was the most important'. Students who were assigned a score of 2 (40%), were able to relate at least one variable or different perspective as part of the justification but did not explore


#### **Table 5.**

*Ethical Reasoning Value Rubric (AAC&U) criteria used in classification of students' justifications, according to [59].*

*A Social Platform for Fostering Ethical Education through Role-Playing DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.96602*

**Figure 7.** *Theme categories found in students' feedback.*

further possible implications in their statements. The students who had a score of 3 (5%), managed to incorporate different perspectives, but their base assumption was inadequate, so the justification lost sense. Lastly, 9% of the students reached the maximum score. This result was expected, because the students are in the first year of their studies, and the ethical discrimination competence is developed throughout the duration of the entire program. Those students who achieved the maximum score, probably had a previous development of the competence, because this was the first activity of this type that was developed in the subject.
