Minneapolis, MN
August 23, 2022
June 26, 2022
June 29, 2022
21
10.18260/1-2--41227
https://peer.asee.org/41227
441
Matthew Green serves as Associate Dean in the School of Engineering and Engineering Technology and Professor of Mechanical Engineering at LeTourneau University in Texas. His objective is to practice and promote engineering as a serving profession. He has taught and developed design courses for all undergraduate years, and has taught courses such as Dynamics, Thermodynamics, and Machine Design. Past projects include remote power generation, design methods for frontier environments, enhanced engineering learning, and assistive devices for persons with disabilities. He coordinates ABET accreditation activities for LeTourneau University.
Prior to joining the civil engineering faculty at Cedarville University in 2020, Dr. Dittenber taught at his alma mater, LeTourneau University in Longview, Texas, for seven years, serving as an associate professor and chair of civil engineering. His areas of specialization are structural and materials engineering, as well as engineering education. He believes that being a Christian and a civil engineer is an exciting pairing, as civil engineers get an opportunity to participate in God’s redemptive work on the earth and serve people by helping provide them with safe solutions to their most fundamental needs. Dr. Dittenber also has a passion for providing engaging teaching experiences, tackling unique and creative projects, and mentoring students through college and what follows.
Here we share findings of student and faculty perceptions of academic integrity practices at two institutions, gaps between these perceptions, and how these perceptions may correlate with markers of ethical engineering identity formation. We hypothesize that a climate of informed ethical practices surrounding academic integrity supports higher levels of student outcomes on an ethical reasoning assessment. As part of this mixed methods study, engineering students indicated their perceptions via a confidential survey of how well faculty fulfill several best practices for supporting academic integrity: articulating clear policies, preventing cheating, and promoting the value of integrity in class. Students also self-reported their perceived achievement of ethical reasoning and what value they place on it. Student responses are compared with performance on an objective ethical-reasoning exam which involves applying a code of ethics to multiple-choice problems that are modeled after licensing exam ethics questions.
Engineering faculty indicated via an anonymized survey and individual interviews their perceptions of how well they fulfill the same best practices for supporting academic integrity as referenced above. Faculty also shared perceptions of the achievement level of student ethical reasoning and what value students place upon it. The gap of student vs. faculty perceptions is compared with student performance on the objective ethical-reasoning exam at one institution. We expected larger perception gaps would correlate to lower ethical reasoning performance. Although our data is not sufficient to support the hypothesis, the results contribute significantly to further investigation and future academic integrity work. Future work beyond the scope of this paper will seek to lower the perception gap by identifying and motivating better faculty support for student academic integrity, which is hoped to lead to higher student outcomes. The work reported in this paper is designed to assess needs and serve as the background to launch future changes in academic integrity education and practices within the two Engineering Schools studied.
Green, M., & Dittenber, D. (2022, August), Measuring Academic Integrity Perceptions and the Correlation with Ethical Reasoning Paper presented at 2022 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition, Minneapolis, MN. 10.18260/1-2--41227
ASEE holds the copyright on this document. It may be read by the public free of charge. Authors may archive their work on personal websites or in institutional repositories with the following citation: © 2022 American Society for Engineering Education. Other scholars may excerpt or quote from these materials with the same citation. When excerpting or quoting from Conference Proceedings, authors should, in addition to noting the ASEE copyright, list all the original authors and their institutions and name the host city of the conference. - Last updated April 1, 2015