Designing Content model of Ethical Competencies Education toStudents in Higher Education System

The purpose of the present study is developing the content pattern of ethical competences for higher education students. In terms of methodology, Sandlowski and Burrow’s 7-stage meta-synthesis model (2007) was used as the conceptual model of the research. During the first step, the research question was presented and, accordingly, the members of the meta-synthesis team were assigned. In the second and third steps, the Latin sources of the research, including Scopus, Springer etc. as well as Persian sources including Scientific Information Database, and Institute for Humanities and Cultural Studies were determined and inclusion criteria of the articles were determined. In step four, after data analysis, 65 basic themes related to ethical education were extracted, and then the findings were synthesized. During this phase, the extracted basic themes were classified into four second-level categories: educational honesty (e.g., courage, enthusiasm and the spirit of providing service) and lack of educational honesty (e.g., disruptive behavior, ignoring the assigned homework, ignoring the rights of others), research honesty (e.g., research awareness) and lack of research honesty (e.g., copying and pasting, expressing the ideas of others without referencing, machine spirit). The second-level organizing themes were assigned to 26 first-level organizing theme and, eventually, the thematic network of the content of ethical education was developed. The developed model in the current research has provided a framework for teaching ethical competences to higher education students which was not possible previously. In order to verify the model, descriptive verification, and interpretive-theoretical-pragmatic verification have been used.