ETHICS INSTRUCTION AND CULTURAL DIFFERENCES IN AN MBA MANAGEMENT ACCOUNTING COURSE

This article discusses a study designed to yield improvements in student moral reasoning when specific instructional strategies and materials for teaching ethical decision making were utilized in a non-ethics MBA management accounting course taught by an instructor who was not formally trained in business ethics. The study reported in this article was conducted in a graduate management accounting course with domestic and foreign students. The specific intervention strategies and instructional materials utilized were developed through several iterations of developmental research that were carried out over a four-year period at a mid-sized Midwestern university. The measurement of moral reasoning used in all of the research was the revised version of the Defining Issues Test, the DIT-2 (Rest, Narvaez, Bebeau & Thoma, 1999). This research was originally funded by a grant from the Lilly Endowment