Reported goals of instructors of responsible conduct of research for teaching of skills.

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) training grant requirement to provide training in the responsible conduct of research (RCR) is now more than 20 years old. Implicit in the requirement is that this training will have an impact not only on what trainees know, but on what they know how to do. There is, however, a range of responses about what skills are seen to be necessary for the ethical practice of science. As part of a larger, earlier study examining RCR instructors' overall goals in teaching RCR, we asked 50 RCR instructors from 37 different institutions what their goals were for teaching skills in their RCR courses. The responses about what constituted necessary skills were wide ranging, from a focus on teaching the skill of ethical decision making to the perceived importance of ensuring that trainees understand the importance of the community in some research relationships. This diversity in responses about what skills should be taught in RCR courses is not especially surprising, given the variation in instructors, formats, instruction, goals, and outcome measures for RCR courses, but it does reinforce the necessity of giving more thought to what goals are to be achieved. This is true not only of skills to be learned, but of any other objectives one might have for research ethics teaching and learning.