Educational equipoise and the educational misconception: Lessons from bioethics

Some advances in bioethics regarding ethical considerations that arise in the context of medical research can also be relevant when thinking about the ethical considerations that arise in the context of SoTL research. In this article, I aim to bring awareness to two potential ethical challenges SoTL researchers might face when playing a dual role of teacher and researcher that are similar to the challenges physicians face in their dual role of physician and researcher. I argue that two commonly discussed concerns in bioethics-the need for clinical equipoise and the possibility of a therapeutic misconception-have analogies when conducting some types of research on students. I call these counterparts educational equipoise and the educational misconception.