DIGITAL TEXT, DISTANCE EDUCATION AND ACADEMIC DISHONESTY: FACULTY AND ADMINISTRATOR PERCEPTIONS AND RESPONSES

Kimberly B Kelley,Kimberly Bonner

doi:10.24059/olj.v9i1.1801

Abstract

This study examined administrator and faculty perceptions of the frequency and pervasiveness of student academic dishonesty, including their perceptions of the personal and contextual factors that affect whether a student is likely to engage in any form of academic dishonesty. One important contextual factorexamined in this study was the extent to which the respondents thought that using the Internet in a course, delivering a course via distance education, or the availability of digital text through the Internet impacted the prevalence, prevention, and detection of academic dishonesty.

Highlights

Academic dishonesty is an issue of serious concern within the academy
When we examined faculty and administrator responses and their perceptions of academic dishonesty, we found that the faculty respondents were significantly more likely to perceive academic dishonesty to be a pervasive problem than their administrator counterparts (χ2=19.1, p
We found that when faculty and administrators perceive that academic dishonesty is pervasive, they have significantly different attitudes about and responses to the problem

Summary

Introduction

Academic dishonesty is an issue of serious concern within the academy. A summary of the past 30 years of research on academic dishonesty indicates that it is a “chronic problem” that affects all levels of education and involves significant numbers of students [1]. Students consistently identify the behavior of their peers as one of the most important situational factors influencing their level of academic honesty [14]. Another important situational factor is the students’ relationship with the faculty members [5, 6, 15]. Previous studies report that students consider the quality of their relationships with their faculty members as one important deterrent. Students report that their perception of the faculty members knowledge of and acceptance of the campus’s academic integrity policies lessens the likelihood they will cheat [2, 9, 14]

Methods

Results

Conclusion