A part of 5.3: Inquiry on Teaching and Learning Poster + Talk session.

Fostering Academic Integrity in First-Year Courses
Chester Scoville, Associate Professor, Teaching Stream, English and Drama, UTM)
Michael Kaler, Assistant Professor, Teaching Stream, Institute for the Study of University Pedagogy, UTM
Christoph Richter, Associate Professor, Teaching Stream, Biology, UTM
Steve Szigeti, Assistant Professor, Teaching Stream, Institute of Communication, Culture, Information and Technology, UTM

If we are to foster a culture of academic integrity in our teaching, we need to understand how our students view this issue, especially as they begin their university careers. Further, we need to understand what justifications or neutralizations students may employ with regard to academic integrity and to the possibility of contravening it. The literature is clear that students often understand academic integrity in different ways than do faculty and staff at universities: not only do they differ with regard to what constitutes a violation of academic integrity, but also with regard to what sorts of offenses are serious, and what extenuating circumstances would justify committing them (e.g. Lofstrom 2011; Rozzet, Hage, and Chow 2012; Beasly 2014). Learning how students think about these issues is vital if we wish to craft effective interventions in our classes. Towards that end, in January 2020 we administered a 29 question survey (derived from Mavrinac et al 2010, as modified by Howard, Ehrich and Walton 2014) to students from three large first-year courses (one Humanities, one Social Science, and one Science course) to help us understand how the students in those courses viewed academic integrity, and specifically how they viewed the act of plagiarism. We repeated this survey in September 2020 and again in January 2021. In this session we will report what the results from over 2200 completed surveys revealed, and offer suggestions about how this data can be used in our strategies for addressing this issue. We hope that our findings will help instructors in designing assessments for all students, in such a way as to minimize the stress surrounding questions of academic integrity.