RETHINKING DATA SCIENCE PEDAGOGY WITH EMBEDDED ETHICAL CONSIDERATIONS

Abstract

The focus of this paper is to present a tool to meet the need of developing ethical critical thinking in data science curricula for undergraduate students. New data science methods impact societies, communities directly or indirectly when dealing with open and other real-world datasets. In particular, for data science there is a need to develop ethical critical thinking while analyzing the data. In the knowledge discovery process there are many opportunities for ethical decision making that a data scientist can evaluate throughout the entire lifecycle of the data to do no harm. To address these concerns within a learning environment focused on skilled workforce development we first introduce a novel ethical data lifecycle framework and then propose a vehicle for implementation through a short term module that can be embedded into a fast paced data science course. The objective of the module is to increase the ethical thinking of students when analyzing data. Pre and post surveys were conducted across each of the two semesters to evaluate students’ attitudes towards ethical thinking. The analysis of the survey results suggests that the objective was achieved based on a positive shift toward agreement with statements related to the importance of ethical thinking.