Thesis (M.A. in education)--Washington State University, May 2010. / Title from PDF title page (viewed on June 23, 2010). "College of Education." Includes bibliographical references (p. 54-57).

Maintaining high levels of academic integrity in nursing programs is critical to student success and the transition to professional practice. Integrity encompasses the values of trustworthiness and honesty. Nursing faculty need to determine if they are providing students with the resources and communication needed to maintain a culture of integrity. It is important for faculty to determine if students tend to rationalize or neutralize the psychological effects of dishonest behaviors. Finally, it is important to determine methods to eliminate violations of academic integrity in nursing education. The overall design of the dissertation provides three distinct articles designed to stand alone as potential articles for publication. This dissertation is a part of a larger collaborative effort with two other Teachers College Doctoral students. The methods and procedures are the same for all principal investigators. Chapters I through III and Chapter V are all uniquely my own. Chapter IV represents the collaborative effort presented in this dissertation. In a cross-sectional, quantitative study design, McCabe’s Academic Integrity Survey- Modified for Nursing Students (MAIS-MNS), a Knowledge Assessment of Academic Integrity, and a Demographics Questionnaire were completed by 442 pre-licensure nursing students. In the individual portion of this study, the relationships between perceived faculty support of academic integrity policies; perceived faculty response to cheating; neutralization; and age are examined to determine if relationships exist between the variables. Additionally, in the collaborative chapter, the variables of severity and perceived faculty support of academic integrity policies were compared to the willingness to report peer violations and program-wide strategies to improve a culture of integrity. Data were analyzed using IBM SPSS Statistics version 27 (IBM Inc., Armonk, NY, USA). Results indicated students who have higher perceived faculty support of academic integrity policies are less likely to rationalize academically dishonest behaviors. It was also found that younger students were more likely to rationalize dishonest behaviors. It is also important to consider from which source students are receiving academic integrity information. Course syllabi, first-year orientation, program counselors, faculty, deans and other administrators, and other students were all found to be significant predictors related to student perception of faculty support of academic integrity policies. Students who have higher perceptions of severity scores and higher perceptions of faculty support of academic integrity policies scores were found to be more willing to report peers. Additionally, having program-wide interventions, such as an honor code, could help strengthen the overall culture of integrity. Frequent communication and consistent academic integrity policies are vital for faculty to maintain throughout nursing programs Faculty should remain vigilant to changing trends in how students violate academic integrity violations and provide consistent messages.

Academic integrity, while important for all students, is especially so for those enrolled in nursing programs. Nurses are entrusted by the public to care for those in need from birth through death. A nursing student who graduates through dishonest means jeopardizes the safety of patients in their care. Nursing faculty need to understand the scope of academic integrity violations and develop meaningful, targeted interventions to show students the harm their actions could cause. The purpose of this dissertation is to explore undergraduate nursing students’ knowledge and perceptions of academic integrity and to specifically look at their willingness to report peer violations. This dissertation study was a collaborative effort among three doctoral students. Using a research team-modified version of McCabe’s Academic Integrity Survey as well as a research team-created Knowledge Assessment, 442 nursing students were surveyed. Results confirm a hesitation to report peers for violations of academic integrity. Students’ ability to neutralize their behaviors as harmless, their desire to remain loyal to their peers, and age act as positive predictive variables for willingness to report peer violations. Additionally, participants’ perceptions of the severity of various offenses and their perceptions of their faculty’s support for academic integrity policies are positively correlated with willingness to report peer violations. Program improvement strategies, such as implementing an honor code, were supported by participants and may help foster a culture of academic integrity that promotes peer reporting. Lastly, a targeted intervention designed for nursing students to promote academic integrity and peer reporting is explored.

This dissertation consists of three essays in the fields of labor economics and education economics. The first chapter examines the effect of residential segregation on neighbor-based informal hiring. Existing works in the neighborhood effects literature have documented mixed evidence of community characteristics on employment and earnings. Yet most studies are silent on or unable to pinpoint the exact mechanisms that drive their results, making it hard to reconcile the conflicting findings. As a departure, in the first chapter, I start with a specific mechanism—job search via neighbor networks—and explore how segregation at the place of residence affects employment through this channel. In the remaining essays, I turn to the economics of education. The second chapter homes in on a specific unintended consequence of standardized testing: cheating between students on exams. While outright cheating is a common tactic to cope with grade pressure, it has received little attention from economists. My second chapter thus contributes to the sparse literature on how inordinate emphasis on exams can distort student behavior even to the test day. Finally, the third chapter revisits the popular belief that education necessarily improves cognitive skills. Insofar as one of the primary goals of school is to develop student intellect, are all years of schooling created equal? Along these lines, I question the value of the first year of high school to Chinese students in the context of the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), an educational initiative of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). To briefly recap, the first chapter studies how residential segregation by race and by education affects job search via neighbor networks. Using confidential data from the US Census Bureau, I measure segregation for each characteristic at both the individual level and the neighborhood level. Causality is achieved by interweaving a spatial framework with a mover-stayer design. The spatial component entails comparison between individuals across different hyperlocal neighborhoods (blocks) within the same reference area (block group). The focus of the comparison is existing residents on a block (stayers) with respect to newcomers (movers). Specifically, I ask: what is the likelihood that an incumbent resident—conditional on changing jobs—will join a firm that has employed a new neighbor on their block? How is this probability mediated by residential segregation? My answers to these questions are manifold. At the individual level, I find that future coworkership with new block neighbors is less likely among segregated stayers than among integrated stayers, irrespective of races and levels of schooling. The impacts are heterogeneous in magnitude, being most adverse for the most socioeconomically disadvantaged demographics: Blacks and those without a high school education. At the block level, however, higher segregation along either dimension raises the likelihood of “any” future coworkership with new block neighbors for all racial or educational “groups.” My hybrid identification strategy, capitalizing on data granularity, allows a causal interpretation of these results. Together, they point to the coexistence of homophily and in-group competition for job opportunities in linking residential segregation to neighbor-based informal hiring. My subtle findings have important implications for policy-making. The second chapter is an investigation of student cheating on high-stakes exams, a relatively understudied topic in the economics of education. The setting is Vietnam, the relevant assessment is the country’s national high school exit exams, and the (mis)behavior of interest is cheating between non-elite students and elite students who happen to sit in the same test room on test day. To quantify the pervasiveness of this misconduct, I exploit the quasi-random assignment of students from schools of varying quality into test rooms. Using micro-data from a large Vietnamese province, I find that the fraction of elite students in the same room has significantly positive effects on non-elite students’ scores when the tests are non-competitive (2007-2013). The effects are concentrated in the multiple-choice/quantitative subject tests and absent in the essay/qualitative subject tests. The average gains due to same-room elite density vary across subjects and can be as large as one point on a 0-10 grading scale. However, these effects disappear after an exam redesign in 2015 raises the stakes of the assessment (2018-2019). Similar patterns emerge when instead of quantity, the quality of the elite students in the same room is the main explanatory variable. Backed by institutional details, these findings provide credible evidence that discreet interpersonal cheating is present pre-reform, but vanishes as the reform reshuffles student incentives. The third and last chapter explores the implications for cognitive skills of increased absolute schooling at an important juncture in a student’s academic career: transition between junior high school (or middle school) and senior high school (or high school). In particular, I ask if the first year of senior secondary school (Grade 10) affects 15-year-old Chinese students’ performance on the PISA 2015. Using a fuzzy regression discontinuity design, I find that on average, this additional year of schooling has no discernible effects on Science, Math, and Reading test scores. However, there is evidence that in the PISA 2015, Chinese tenth graders have fewer hours of in-school class time in these subjects and enjoy Science and peer cooperation less than comparable Chinese ninth graders. These observations add to the disappointment left by the lack of effects on test scores, even when they are insufficient to explain it away.

Academic integrity essentially centers on an individual’s ethical attitudes and behaviors as well as injunctive norms, or norms that dictate what is socially accepted and lauded. One key influence may be pluralistic ignorance; here arguments for cheating posit that students cheat because they perceive that others are “doing it” to a greater extent than is actually true and thus what they are doing is minimized in relation to others. Research indicates that students perceive cheating as more widespread than it actually is (Hard, Conway, & Moran, 2006). A considerable gap in the research is noted when looking at definitions of what constitutes academic fraud, research has indicated that when students are asked if they have cheated and then given a definition of cheating, their self-reports of cheating increase (Burrus et al., 2007). This indicates that students’ definition of cheating and a universities’ definition of cheating may be incongruent. Participants were 507 members of the Florida Atlantic University community during the 2012-2013 academic year who completed a survey that consisted of items, which centered on self-reported cheating, perceptions of what cheating constitutes, and estimates of cheating prevalence. Results indicate that students reported peer cheating to be higher then self reported cheating, that participants distinguished between five different forms of cheating, and that faculty and students hold differing definitions of cheating. The findings suggest a disconnect between faculty perceptions and definitions of academic integrity and students. This would suggest that greater efforts should to be taken to bring a more uniform operational definition of what constitutes academic dishonesty that universities, faculty, and students can rely on. Second, as a pluralist model of cheating was supported, universities could develop campaigns like those aimed at reducing drinking, hooking up, and increasing women in STEM fields (Lambert, Kahn & Apple, 2003; Mattern & Neighbors, 2004; Muldoon, 2002; Schroder & Prentice, 1998). Research has suggested social norm campaigns targeting pluralistic ignorance can be effective on college campuses. In educating students about what actually happens and the discrepancy between reality and perception, cases of academic dishonesty could be reduced. / Includes bibliography. / Dissertation (Ph.D.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2015. / FAU Electronic Theses and Dissertations Collection

Previous research on academic dishonesty in colleges and universities has consistently shown unacceptable rates of cheating, yet inconsistent reports of sex differences in cheating. Sex differences in cheating were studied in relation to sex role orientation and attitudes towards cheating, and in light of a distinction between two types of cheating; cheating to benefit oneself and cheating to benefit another. 256 undergraduate students completed anonymous surveys to tap their sex role orientation, attitudes towards cheating, and reported frequency of cheating. Although females reported having more disapproving attitudes towards cheating than males, they reported engaging in cheating just as much as males. Sex role orientation was not directly related to cheating, but female-associated characteristics were related to attitudes towards cheating, which, in turn, were strongly related to cheating behavior. It was also found that participants reported engaging in more cheating to benefit another person than cheating to benefit themselves. / Department of Psychological Science

Thesis (Ed.D.)--Teachers College, Columbia University, 1996. / Typescript; issued also on microfilm. Sponsor: Dawn Person. Dissertation Committee: Lee Knefelkamp. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 226-240).

Research has consistently shown that academic dishonesty has a detrimental impact on the learning process. Nevertheless, very little research explores "cheating" behaviors from students’ perspectives or the role that peer groups play in the proliferation or reduction of cheating cultures. Academic dishonesty has always been an important subject to study. Still, it is even more crucial today to explore this issue in Western contexts and Eastern countries such as Vietnam. This study seeks to fill the knowledge gap using a quantitative approach that draws on a sample of approximately 1,000 high school students in five provinces of Vietnam. I seek to understand three research questions: (1) How do Vietnamese high school students define "academic dishonesty”? (2) To what extent do personal and contextual factors influence the students' attitudes toward cheating; and (3) How does the difference between the definition of cheating and students’ attitudes affect students’ decisions to engage in cheating. The result of the Latent Class Analysis shows that Vietnamese students have very different perspectives on what is regarded as cheating in school. , In general, the definition of what it means as “cheating” is highly diverse. Student defined cheating differently depends on where it happens and who is involved, not just on the action itself. In the second research question, using different type of regression analysis and factor analysis, this study further finds that the student’s definition of cheating is the strongest among all the variables and is most likely to affect students’ reactions and attitudes about cheating. Other significant factors found included parental highest education level, leadership position in class, overall classroom achievement, and diligence culture affect students’ reactions. In the final research question, the study examines societal factors and finds that classroom climate also plays an essential role in explaining how students engage in cheating. Often, the class that values hard work over achievement has fewer students who confess to cheating, cheating frequently, and cheating in multiple subjects. In addition, a competitive culture that focuses on achievement can also affect and pressure students to cheat. This finding highlights the importance of studying dishonestly through the lens of sociology which goes further than the student’s values or “rebellious nature” that makes them cheat. While various research in the field has examined multiple factors related to student cheating, we need to understand the students' rationales for commit cheating to provide root-cause solutions and actionable steps to reduce cheating in schools. The dissertation concludes with recommendations for future research and policy recommendation at the national policy level and at the local school or classroom level.

This study explored the relationship between cheating among university students and their cognitive developmental levels, use of neutralization techniques, self-concept as a multifaceted cognitive construct, and attitude toward cheating. The purposes of this study were to investigate: (1) The relationships between academic dishonesty and each of the following overall independent variables: cognitive development, use of neutralization techniques, self-concept as a multifaceted cognitive construct, and attitude toward cheating, and (2) the reasons behind college student academic cheating behaviors. The study used data from anonymous, self-report surveys administered to undergraduate students in-class and at supplemental sessions. Student participation was voluntary. The study was correlational. The five hypotheses were: (1) Self-concept is significantly and negatively related to academic dishonesty; (2) Cognitive development is significantly and negatively related to academic dishonesty; (3) Attitude toward cheating is significantly and negatively related to academic dishonesty; (4) The use of neutralization techniques is significantly and positively related to academic dishonesty; (5) Cognitive development, self-concept, and attitude toward cheating will make significant contributions to the regression model for the dependent variables of academic dishonesty. The data supported the first, third, and fourth hypotheses. However, the second and fifth hypotheses were supported under certain conditions. The roles of cognitive development and self-concept in academic dishonesty represent major findings.

Cheating in an examination is an act of deception by students to gain unfair advantage over others by using unauthorized materials and information. There is a significant increase in test cheating, unpermitted student collaboration and an increased prevalence of chronic cheating (The Standard, 9th March 2012). Among those who cheat are students in technical institutions, where there is recurrence of cheating in the internal examinations. Some studies identify factors such as the following, that contribute to cheating: students learning from a dishonest society (Marks, 2003:135), poor teaching, poor learning environment and lack of facilities (Korbs,2009:2), an education system that is concerned about performance, poor time management (Carrol, 2006), lack of effective study habits (Chinamase et al. 2011) and technology (Marks, 2003). However, there is no readily available information on factors that contribute to cheating in technical institutions. The purpose of this study was to investigate factors that contribute to cheating in internal examinations, methods used in cheating and reasons for students to cheat; and the main aim was to devise and recommend strategies that can be applied to curb cheating in examinations in technical institutions in Central Province, Kenya. The 22 study participants (n=22) were selected from two technical institutions in Central, Kenya. The participating institutions were purposively selected and from them the participants were randomly selected. The participants comprised of 16 students who had either cheated or knew some students who had cheated in examinations, 4 lecturers who were directly involved in examination administration and 2 examination officers who provided documents collected previously on cheating. A qualitative case study was used to collect data. The data was collected using observation method, structured interviews and document analysis. The data collected through interviews were then transcribed and grouped into categories guided by research questions and reviewed literature. The results of the study show several factors that contribute to cheating. These are: contextual factors such as class attendance, lecturer-student interactions, poor invigilation, and lack of adequate facilities. The participants raised the following suggestions on how cheating may be curbed: strict supervision of examination, provision of adequate facilities, and frequent administration of tests and assignment. Recommendations on measures to be applied were presented along with suggestions for further research in this area. / Educational Leadership and Management / M. Ed. (Education Management)