Abstract:
Business ethics education is gaining increasing importance in times of global crisis, technological innovation, and social polarization. Questions of responsibility, fairness, and sustainability are economically relevant and essential for the functioning of democracy. As part of contemporary citizenship education, engaging with business ethics in schools contributes significantly to the development of students’ moral judgment, value orientations, and reflective participation in society. Schools thus play a key role in promoting responsible judgment and action-oriented competences. However, this requires innovative pedagogical approaches that actively involve learners in addressing complex moral questions. Inquiry-based learning (IBL) is considered a particularly promising pedagogical approach in this respect, as it supports independent thinking, critical analysis, and reflective moral reasoning. The digital implementation of IBL further enhances its potential by promoting collaboration, offering adaptive support, and fostering the development of key digital competences. Despite the widely recognized potential of digital IBL, there is still a lack of systematic research linking business ethics education with digital IBL at the secondary level. To address this research gap, this dissertation examines how digitally supported IBL can contribute to the development of business ethical competences in secondary education and what factors influence its effectiveness by connecting the social scientific field of business ethics with a pedagogical approach originally developed in the natural sciences. The aim of this dissertation is to systematically analyze the key factors identified in the literature as influencing the effectiveness of digital learning—learner and teacher characteristics, contextual conditions, and learning engagement—across three empirical studies. By examining these elements, it investigates the effectiveness of digital IBL in the social sciences.
Focusing on learner characteristics, the first study, which employed a qualitative interview design, examined the conceptions of 33 eighth-grade students regarding business ethical issues. The findings showed that students reflected on business ethics predominantly in a fragmented and individual-ethical manner. Although some students demonstrated various conceptions of ethical economic behavior, their reasoning largely remained limited to consumer decisions, while political dimensions were scarcely considered. This narrow perspective was further reflected in misconceptions about governmental and corporate responsibilities as well as the distribution of economic power in competitive markets.
The second study, which included 445 students, employed a quasi-experimental design to investigate the effectiveness of digitally supported IBL on competence development, considering contextual and teacher-related influences. While no evidence was found for a significant overall effect compared to traditional instruction, gender-specific differences emerged: for female students, digital IBL led to higher economic interest and intrinsic motivation, whereas male students showed a decrease in economic interest.
The third study examined the role of student engagement, which is widely recognized as a key success factor in digital learning environments. Based on log data from 285 students, the quantitative analysis revealed that higher levels of behavioral engagement were associated with greater knowledge gains and stronger development of business-related competences. Interactive and visually oriented learning formats proved particularly beneficial. Learners who exhibited balanced use of various activity types—termed “all-rounders”—achieved the best learning outcomes and displayed higher levels of digital competence.
Building on the findings of individual studies, this dissertation develops, for the first time, a subject-specific, empirically grounded framework model for the effectiveness of digital IBL in the social sciences. By illustrating and extending existing knowledge through the inclusion of learner and teacher characteristics, contextual factors, and student engagement, this work provides new empirical and theoretical insights into business ethics education at the secondary level and demonstrates how digital learning environments can be designed to foster critical reflection, sound moral judgment, and a sense of responsibility. Furthermore, the dissertation offers conceptual implications for teacher education—for instance, in further developing adaptive, multiperspectival, and gender-sensitive approaches to instructional design—and educational policy, particularly concerning cross-curricular frameworks and infrastructural provisions. In doing so, it establishes an empirically substantiated foundation for future research and practice-oriented developments aimed at promoting innovative teaching and learning concepts that support democratic and ethically grounded citizenship education in the digital age.
business ethics