Ethics Information for Teachers

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For the Canterbury-Westland Schools’ Science and Technology Fair we follow the guidelines set out by the Royal Society and the NZASE guidelines for research. The CREST projects via the Royal Society website are similar to the science fair in terms of ethics. There is info on animal and human ethics here. Also see the student page on Ethics

Animal Ethics

The ANZCCART website is very informative and has useful resources (they also sponsor a prize for a project in which appropriate animal ethics protocols have been observed). The NZASE website also has a lot of information about animal ethics. Use this flowchart to help determine if ethics committee approval is required.

Human Ethics

You can find a human ethics planning form here, and a possible CREST human consent form.

Based on the below information you, as the teacher, can determine whether ethics approval from a committee is required and ensure that the projects your students carry out meet the conditions set out in the guidelines, and that all human participants (or their parents) will need to be provided with relevant information and fill out a consent form.

Excerpt from NZASE article on human ethics guidelines for schools:

“Schools need to follow a formal approvals process for projects and research involving animals. Entries are not permitted into science fairs unless there is proof that an approval had been given by the AEC. An assumption was made, understandably by teachers in schools, that science fair entries that involved human participants also required ethics approval and this became de facto policy and practice. Because the AEC is not accredited or entitled to deal with ethics approvals relating to humans, the approvals application process for science fair entries involving humans was initially dealt with on a case-by-case basis by one or more of the Ministry of Health’s regional Health and Disability Ethics Committees. While these committees are accredited by the Health Research Council Ethics Committee (HRCEC) to give ethics approval for human research, the nature of their role is particular to health research as defined by the Health Research Council Act (1990) not education research. Apart from the various ethics committees operating within each of New Zealand’s tertiary education organisations, there are no accredited committees set up to approve human ethics-related research undertaken by school students in an education setting or any legislation that requires this. Therefore, unlike the requirements set down by the Animal Welfare Act, students’school-based research and projects involving human participants are not legally required to follow any formalised approvals process. However, in 2008 the MOE determined that there was a need to provide schools with Human Ethics Guidelines, suitable for guiding school-based student research that involves human beings as participants in the research. They also recognised that the development of working tools to help student and teacher researchers to plan their investigations with foresight and to alert school management to their responsibilities – and possible issues and risks – was necessary. NZASE was contracted to develop these. It was stressed that these were to be guidelines to schools and not intended to be mandatory requirements. …

…2. Specifying teacher and student responsibilities: Another feature of these guidelines that makes them particularly school-focused is the specification of teacher responsibilities and student responsibilities. There is a strong sense of duty in the articulation of student responsibilities.The teacher is there to supervise and guide so is responsible, but the student also has a defined role as researcher with associated tasks to carry out. Students are to get teacher approval before they commence their project; they need to negotiate a time frame for reporting to their teacher at regular intervals; in preparing written information for their research participants they must use the templates provided in section three of the guidelines; they are required to seek guidance from their teacher if they are unsure about whether to get consent from the parents/caregivers of older school aged participants as well as from the students themselves; they must consult with their teacher before they make a change to their project; and they must advise their teacher immediately if a problem arises. How to report verbatim what a participant has said needs to be talked through with the teacher, as does any proposed use of photographic images. As well as being available for the day-to-day planning, execution and reporting associated with student research in a pedagogical sense, teachers have wider responsibilities to their discipline and to the research enterprise generally, and also professionally through compliance with Ministry of Education requirements, for example, those outlined in Safety and science: A guidance manual for New Zealand schools (2000).Teachers also need to make sure students are aware of any implications of the Privacy Act 1993 for what they are proposing to do.”