It appears to be a remarkable breach of trust.
Plenty of graduate students dislike the research assignments handed to them by professors.
Stories like this highlight there is media interest not only in what we research but also the ethics of our research. For SoTL researchers this emphasizes the need to be careful not to breach the trust of our students and to use care about matters such as privacy and consent. AHRECS was funded by the OLT to produce a few resource booklets about research ethics in SoTL research
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“I didn’t want to do it, period,” says Whitman. “It didn’t meet research best practices in any aspect. [We were] illegally harvesting data.”
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For two years, professors at PSU’s Graduate School of Education conducted a research project using unwitting K-12 students as subjects. The university has since acknowledged it failed to inform parents of the research and did not get their permission to access the student data. University officials say they are still examining whether any laws were broken.
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