Disciplines
Social Psychology
Abstract (300 words maximum)
The rise of online classrooms has brought forth new concerns about academic integrity that may not have been present in traditional brick-and-mortar classrooms. Emerging social technology, such as GroupMe, an app used to facilitate group text-messaging, has added a new dimension to academic integrity concerns. However, almost no research has been conducted examining how this technology impacts student behavior in the classroom. The current study investigates the degree to which students perceive various GroupMe conversations as including violations of academic integrity. Participants will be randomly assigned to read one of six GroupMe conversations in a 2 (type of cheating: meeting to collaborate on an online assessment vs. sharing answers to an online assessment) x 3 (obviousness of cheating: no cheating, ambiguous, vs. blatant) between-subjects design. After reading the GroupMe conversation, participants’ perceptions of the extent to which the conversation is considered cheating and how they predict they would respond to the presented situation will be assessed. Participants’ personality, perfectionism, and characteristics (e.g. age, race, gender, GPA, academic concentration) will also be assessed. It is predicted that participants reading the ambiguous conversion will produce both a higher degree of uncertainty in perceptions of cheating and a higher degree of non-reactive responses (e.g., remaining in but not interacting with peers in the group chat) than participants reading the blatant conversations. Additionally, we expect that participants’ conscientiousness and GPA will be positively associated with their willingness to either remove themselves from a chat or report an instance of cheating. We plan to test our hypotheses via correlational analyses, analyses of variance, and regression. This study may provide insight into how students perceive instances of cheating in GroupMe, the circumstances in which GroupMe may become a catalyst for cheating, and the characteristics of students who may be involved in GroupMe cheating.
Academic department under which the project should be listed
RCHSS - Psychological Science
Primary Investigator (PI) Name
Dr. Jennifer Willard
Included in
GroupMe or GroupCheat? Student Perceptions and Reactions to Violations of Academic Integrity
The rise of online classrooms has brought forth new concerns about academic integrity that may not have been present in traditional brick-and-mortar classrooms. Emerging social technology, such as GroupMe, an app used to facilitate group text-messaging, has added a new dimension to academic integrity concerns. However, almost no research has been conducted examining how this technology impacts student behavior in the classroom. The current study investigates the degree to which students perceive various GroupMe conversations as including violations of academic integrity. Participants will be randomly assigned to read one of six GroupMe conversations in a 2 (type of cheating: meeting to collaborate on an online assessment vs. sharing answers to an online assessment) x 3 (obviousness of cheating: no cheating, ambiguous, vs. blatant) between-subjects design. After reading the GroupMe conversation, participants’ perceptions of the extent to which the conversation is considered cheating and how they predict they would respond to the presented situation will be assessed. Participants’ personality, perfectionism, and characteristics (e.g. age, race, gender, GPA, academic concentration) will also be assessed. It is predicted that participants reading the ambiguous conversion will produce both a higher degree of uncertainty in perceptions of cheating and a higher degree of non-reactive responses (e.g., remaining in but not interacting with peers in the group chat) than participants reading the blatant conversations. Additionally, we expect that participants’ conscientiousness and GPA will be positively associated with their willingness to either remove themselves from a chat or report an instance of cheating. We plan to test our hypotheses via correlational analyses, analyses of variance, and regression. This study may provide insight into how students perceive instances of cheating in GroupMe, the circumstances in which GroupMe may become a catalyst for cheating, and the characteristics of students who may be involved in GroupMe cheating.