International Journal for Educational Integrity

There is no consensus on definitions of educational or academic integrity, and their philosophical relationship with the notion of responsibility is complex. Here, we aim to i) disentangle these three notions. We lean on a philosophical framework of ethics and our method involves different kinds of reasoning and the modeling of complex thinking. We combine this frame with a three-level epistemic dimension to allow us ii) to model the psycho-epistemic (level 1), epistemological (level 2), and phenomenological (ground 0) ways in which subjects interact with their own norms and knowledge and with those of the surrounding institutions. Finally, iii) we also aim to propose concrete educational means by which to implement educational integrity. Our theoretical findings lead us i) to consider responsibility as a process that consists of establishing a dialogical relationship between one’s inner and outer worlds, which relies on an epistemic decentering. Based on this, we argue that education for responsibility founds a new, expanded definition of educational integrity. Moreover, ii) empirical evidence suggests that this model can be operationalized by psychological indicators such as critical and complex thinking, cognitive flexibility, contextual relativism, and decentering, all of which are skills that can be fostered in spite of simplifying thinking, dogmatism, naive epistemology (and dualism) and cognitive fusion, respectively. It points to iii) the benefits of an educational approach in which subjects are encouraged to practice different types of meditation and to feel free to break institutional rules. Therefore, promoting educational integrity may require methods that lie beyond the obvious choices. After discussing the scope and limitations of our results, we propose a new research agenda for educational integrity, which could ground a field of research broader than just academic integrity, but complementary to it.

This study aims to examine the relationship between workplace and classroom incivility to learning engagement and the moderating role of internal locus of control in these relationships. An online questionnaire was administered to 432 students from three private universities in Jakarta, Indonesia. The regression analysis results showed that both workplace and classroom incivility has a negative and significant effect on learning engagement. In addition, the direct effect of workplace incivility on learning engagement is moderated by the locus of control. The negative effect of workplace incivility on learning engagement is stronger for students with low levels of internal locus of control than for those students with high levels of internal locus of control. This study provides a better understanding of the internal mechanism condition to reduce the negative effects of incivility experiences that occur in the workplace and classroom among student employees. The implications and limitations are also discussed.

Much of the current literature on plagiarism focuses on students, attempting to understand how students view the concept of plagiarism, the best ways to prevent it, and the impact of collaboration on the concept of original authorship. In this article, we look at the role of plagiarism in 761 conference abstracts written by graduate students, early- to late-career faculty, and industry representatives, representing institutions from nearly 70 countries. These abstracts were submitted for participation in an international conference focused on the liberal arts hosted by our institution over the past four years. This study analyzes the corpus for patterns of plagiarism among professional academic writers. Our findings indicate that, while other demographic categories were not consistent indicators of text-matching, full professors were the most prevalent group to produce self-plagiarized abstracts. Overall, our study illuminates the significance of power dynamics in conferences’ efforts to maintain academic integrity.

The COVID-19 pandemic created a situation for the implementation of emergency remote learning. This meant that as a lecturer at a traditionalist University of contact sessions, the pandemic forced us to teach remotely through online methods of communication, using online lectures, narrated powerpoints, voice clips, podcasts, interviews and interactive videos. The assessments were conducted online from assignments to multiple choice questions, which forced the lecturers to think differently about the way the assessments were presented, in order to avoid easy access to answers found in a textbook and online. This meant that more application questions of theory to practice were assessed in a more challenging way to prevent cheating and collaboration with peers. Formal assessments completed during emergency remote learning, have become the past practice, as innovative methods have been adopted for learning and for assessment purposes in order to preserve the integrity and attainment of the degree through online modes of learning. The aim of the paper investigates and explores the methods of teaching, together with the results obtained from the students of 2019 and 2020 in their final year relating to two final year modules against the literature relating to learning processes and methodologies.

The ambition of the article is to create an awareness among upper secondary school pupils on what academic integrity and source criticism mean. Instead of devoting time to a general presentation of academic studies, the claim is that a collective reflection based upon the common practices of pupils (sources) could be efficient to describe the outlines of academic integrity. An action research was made in 2019 and 2020 among Swedish upper secondary school pupils with the help of an instructional video on sources, academic integrity and plagiarism. It revealed a consensus on the notion of source criticism. Furthermore, the findings show that a majority of pupils used platforms such as Wikipedia to get a quick access to facts without daring quoting them in a work for school. This gap represents an opportunity to introduce academic integrity in a very concrete manner with an insistence on the necessity of citing all the sources that contributed to the elaboration of a work.

The data produced by the scientific community impacts on academia, clinicians, and the general public; therefore, the scientific community and other regulatory bodies have been focussing on ethical codes of conduct. Despite the measures taken by several research councils, unethical research, publishing and/or reviewing behaviours still take place. This exploratory study considers some of the current unethical practices and the reasons behind them and explores the ways to discourage these within research and other professional disciplinary bodies. These interviews/discussions with PhD students, technicians, and academics/principal investigators (PIs) (N=110) were conducted mostly in European higher education institutions including UK, Italy, Ireland, Portugal, Czech Republic and Netherlands. Through collegiate discussions, sharing experiences and by examining previously published/reported information, authors have identified several less reported behaviours. Some of these practices are mainly influenced either by the undue institutional expectations of research esteem or by changes in the journal review process. These malpractices can be divided in two categories relating to (a) methodological malpractices including data management, and (b) those that contravene publishing ethics. The former is mostly related to “committed bias”, by which the author selectively uses the data to suit their own hypothesis, methodological malpractice relates to selection of out-dated protocols that are not suited to the intended work. Although these are usually unintentional, incidences of intentional manipulations have been reported to authors of this study. For example, carrying out investigations without positive (or negative) controls; but including these from a previous study. Other methodological malpractices include unfair repetitions to gain statistical significance, or retrospective ethical approvals. In contrast, the publication related malpractices such as authorship malpractices, ethical clearance irregularities have also been reported. The findings also suggest a globalised approach with clear punitive measures for offenders is needed to tackle this problem.

There is a growing international interest in ethical issues in research and the process by which it can be enhanced. Unlike in the past when research studies were conducted abruptly, almost all organisations and research institutes now have various mechanisms to ensure compliance with ethical standards and procedures. Adult and community education research in Nigeria continues to gain the attention of governments and Non-governmental organisations (NGOs) due to the need to improve the literacy rate among adult learners and out-of-school youths in the country. However, in many workshops and training involving academics and development workers, much of the discussions on ethical issues in data collection and research reportage are not given the necessary attention that it requires. This review paper explores the ethical issues in adult and community education research with a view to re-awakening the consciousness of adult education scholars and practitioners, both in Nigeria and on the continent of Africa, to rethink how research data and processes are managed, such that it conforms with best practices globally.

Socializing students to Academic Integrity (AI) in the face of great cultural, linguistic and socioeconomic diversity in the student population in higher education calls for innovative strategies that are aligned with equity, diversity and inclusion principles. Through a mixed method of quantitative analysis of learner engagement data from the Learning Management System (LMS) and analysis of anonymous evaluation survey, along with thematic analysis of students’ open-ended responses in the evaluation survey, the authors explored how students responded to AI Socialization during a 4-week non-credit, online co-curricular program called ‘Reading and Writing Excellence’ (RWE). Nine groups of undergraduate students (N=182) from 34 disciplines in different global locations during the COVID-19 pandemic were introduced to a curated set of AI online resources. Through a learner-driven, instructor-facilitated approach the AI Socialization also engaged students in language development and empowered them to communicate about their disciplinary course topics through written journal entries, receiving instructor feedback that increased their cultural and linguistic capital for further academic writing. This approach led to a high volume of written output (on average 6064 words per student written over a 4-week period). Nonparametric ANOVA was used to establish that low-proficiency students were able to produce as much written output as their more proficient peers. Survey results for various aspects important to academic integrity show students’ self-perception of readiness for academic writing: paraphrasing and summarizing (92%); organization of ideas (92%); critical thinking (93%); logic/argument (92%). Insights gained about educative engagement, language development and learner empowerment that can help students from diverse backgrounds to avoid Academic Integrity Violations (AIVs) and gain transformative access and success in higher education are incorporated into a set of recommendations that are applicable to a wide range of teaching contexts.

Academic integrity has become a significant point of concern in the post-secondary landscape, and many institutions are now exploring ways on how to implement academic integrity training for students. This paper delineates the development of an Academic Integrity E-Learning (AIE-L) tutorial at MacEwan University, Canada. In its first incarnation, the AIE-L tutorial was intended as an education tool for students who had been found to violate the University’s Academic Integrity Policy. However, in a discourse of the academic integrity process, the University reimagined it from only emphasising the increased understanding and strengthened commitment of students found to have committed academic misconduct to a proactive focus with education for all students. The purpose of the present paper is three-fold: first, describe the development of the AIE-L tutorial as an experiential case study; second, improve the content of the AIE-L tutorial through students’ quantitative and qualitative feedback; third, calibrate the pre and post-test questions for content validity for a forthcoming large-scale measurement of the AIE-L tutorial effectiveness.