![]() Sam provides a vision for the type of school climate in which collaboration, not cheating, would be most encouraged. This way of teaching wouldn't be based on time crunching every lesson, but more about helping a student understand a concept.” From there the teachers would assess students' progress with this information, new material would be created to help individual students with what they don't understand. Students would learn information and be tested on the information. Sam (Texas) wrote, “A school where cheating isn't necessary would be centered around individualization and learning. Several of the older students with whom we spoke were able to offer us ideas about how schools might create more ethical communities. In this case, while cheating might be wrong, it is an acceptable means to a higher-level goal. And I hated that class and I didn’t want to retake it again.” Here, she identifies allegiance to a parallel ethical value: Graduating from high school. For example, Alejandra (Texas) wrote, “The times I had cheated when I was failing a class, and if I failed the final I would repeat the class. Students noted a few types of extenuating circumstances, including high stakes moments. ![]() Students cheat because they think if they cheat all the time they’re going to get smarter.” In addition to pressure from peers, students spoke about pressure from adults, pressure related to standardized testing, and the demands of competing responsibilities. Sometimes they have a reason to cheat like feeling they need to be the smartest kid in class.” Kayla (Massachusetts) agreed, noting, “Some people cheat because they want to seem cooler than their friends or try to impress their friends. For example, Michima (Massachusetts) wrote, “Peer pressure makes students cheat. Other students focused on external factors that might make their peers feel pressured to cheat. Umna (Massachusetts) echoed this idea, noting that “cheating is … not using the evidence in your head and only using the evidence that’s from someone else’s head.” For example, Julio (Massachusetts) wrote, “Teachers care about cheating because its not fair students get good grades didn't follow the teacher's rules.” His perspective represents one set of ideas that we heard, which suggests that cheating is an unethical decision caused by personal misjudgment. Students critiqued both the individual decision-making of peers and the school-based structures that encourage cheating. They rarely have access to information on current educational research, partially because they are not the intended audience of such work.” "Too often, students are cut out of conversations about school policies and culture. In doing so, they provide us with additional insights into why students cheat and how schools might better foster ethical collaboration. We asked these youth informants to connect their own insights and ideas about cheating with the ideas described in " Ethical Collaboration." They wrote from a range of perspectives, grappling with what constitutes cheating, why people cheat, how people cheat, and when cheating might be ethically acceptable. I worked with Gretchen Brion-Meisels to investigate these questions by talking to two classrooms of students from Massachusetts and Texas about their experiences with cheating. In other words, how are young people “reading the world,” to quote Paulo Freire, when it comes to questions of cheating, and what might we learn from their perspectives? The article left me wondering how students themselves might respond to these ideas, and whether their experiences with cheating reflected the researchers’ understanding. The piece offers several explanations for why students cheat and provides powerful ideas about how to create ethical communities. ![]() ![]() In March, Usable Knowledge published an article on ethical collaboration, which explored researchers’ ideas about how to develop classrooms and schools where collaboration is nurtured but cheating is avoided. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |