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Academic Dishonesty

In this new age of technology driven classrooms comes along many obstacles, including

academic dishonesty. The term academic dishonesty is not new but now we see it commonly

involved with the internet and technology. Students can easily cheat on assignments using their

technological sources. A research study I discovered was “interested in the latent construction of

students’ academic dishonesty practices towards the use of information technologies (IT) in a

Romanian higher education context mirrored in three dimensions, corresponding respectively to

plagiarism, fraudulence, and misuse” (Mata et al., 2020). The study used a questionnaire to

collect data regarding the factors, relations, and variances with these three dimensions. The

participants of this study were Science Education and Science students who were studying to

become schoolteachers (Mata et al., 2020). There were 374 responses to the questionnaire split

between two different colleges. The majority of the results were female and between the age of

21-30 years old. “Students’ e-dishonesty practices were measured through the Internet-triggered

Academic Dishonesty Scale (ITADS) developed by Akbulut et al. (2008) and Karim et al.

(2009)” (Mata et al., 2020). The results of this study showed that there was a strong correlation

between plagiarism, fraudulence, and misuse in using information technologies in the tested

group. Plagiarism was found to be the most important factor. The results of this study are

interesting and applicable for my own teaching because of how my own students can relate to

those in this study. My students also are faced with access to information technologies that can

either be used positively or incorrectly. It is important for my students to understand before they

get to college that plagiarism, fraudulence, and misuse of these technologies not only gets them

into trouble in school but also keeps them from truly learning the information.
MODULE 201 2

References

Mata, L., Lazar, I. M., & Ghiatau, R. (2020). Exploring Academic Dishonesty Practices among

Science Education University Students. Journal of Baltic Science Education, 19(1), 91–

107.