Learning Outcome Three: Employ techniques of active reading, critical reading, and informal reading response for inquiry, learning, and thinking.

Introduction:

When reading difficult texts, I like to mark up the page quite a bit because I am a visual learner. I usually take it paragraph by paragraph underlining, questioning, and making clear marks for when I later refer to the text, and I understand what I meant at that moment. I believe that when reading a challenging text, it’s best to talk back to the author and challenge his or her thoughts right on that page. Often times, I will stop and paraphrase the thoughts that the author is trying to convey that I find challenging, then put my thoughts back into the text and continue reading. Gilroy suggests taking the information apart, looking at its parts, and trying to put it back together in a language that is easier for you to comprehend. By doing this, you can see each main point or the skeleton of the text. This is a method I already follow. It helps me when having a dialogue with the author in the margins when challenging his or her text. 

Below I annotated my article by questioning connecting and showing interests.

Professional Ethics: Business Students’ Perceptions 

Journal Entry:

My article was called Professional Ethics: Business Students Perception, this article was about how the study of ethical responses of college business students. The variables examined were perceptions of ethical responses. It was also about maturation as the college student got older. This was conducted in the Netherlands at various colleges. The purpose of this article was to shed light on how a business student matured in ethical thoughts. This was an interesting and worthwhile topic because it explains how business students can further develop their ethical thoughts during education through the upper levels. 

The research method used was a survey, in which business students were asked if they thought a phrase was ethical or not. They tested three hypotheses and none of them could be proven wrong. They did find that they needed to conduct more research to fully understand their results. This study was only conducted while the students were in college if they continued to participate in the study after college they may have different results on a bigger spectrum. The final take away from this study is that business schools need to attempt to increase awareness of their students in this area. 

Questions:

1. “Kholberg and Mayer concluded that only an aggressive approach using cognitive development theory could satisfactorily achieve the proper education results.” 
   • This is confusing because no actual evidence was backing this claim up to as to why this is the only way. 
2. “Some of the surveyed respondents in the two studies cited above, and others who claim expertise in the study of ethics, believe that while businesses as a whole are ethical, many individuals in business do not operate in the same ethical sphere.”
   • The previous claim above gave the opposite opinion so it becomes confusing to the reader as to what they mean by this. 
3. “This is unfortunate because situation ethics have no place in either business or government operations. A person needs to be able to separate ethical from unethical situations without having to create a set of standards for every situation.” 
   • This was confusing to me because businesses create a code of conduct for a reason so that they can separate the different ethical norms and how to handle them. 

Interest/Curiosity: 

1. “Improving the ethical behavior of the organization must coincide with improving the ethical behavior of its employees.”
   • I found this interesting because maybe this will improve if the employees stay happy in the workplace; meaning, what does the manager have to do to keep them happy and in good standing with the business. 
2. “This education process may be accomplished during college, through formal training sponsored by the organization or via on the job training.” 
   • I found this interesting because job training will make people happier because they feel comfortable therefore more willing to just make the ethical choice. 
3. “Research has been conducted to evaluate changes in students’ ethical behavior after one course (Arlow and Ulrich, 1980), to determine if certain business majors are more ethical than others.” 
   • I just find this study interesting. 

Connections: 

1. “Fortunately, businesses have not let this deter their efforts to improve ethical behavior” 
   • Understanding a company’s social impact is crucial to sustainability- thegaurdin.com
2. “Once ethical considerations become a part of every employee’s decision process the effectiveness of the organization will greatly improve.” 
   • I connected this to a strong business model and company
3. Ethical thinking comes when it does
   • Some business people are successful very young because of ethical thinking, but others are older.