Week 0: Introduction and Background

Hello everyone! I am Shirley Fan. Welcome to my first senior project blog post! Over the next few months, I will be executing experiments and performing analysis on data regarding the influence of teacher messaging on high school student perceptions and actions on academic integrity.

Cheating in general has been a long-existing problem in all levels of education and with technological advancements like the internet and ChatGPT, cheating has only become easier. Cheating is a global problem where students cut corners to get good grades but do not actually learn the material. In the long term, cheating can result in professionals who did not truly earn their credentials and do not have the skills needed for their jobs. In order to solve a problem as rampant as cheating, one first has to understand the effect different influences have on an individual’s tendency to cheat. 

Being a high school student myself, I often hear talk of cheating in my peers’ conversations and constantly hear my teachers talking about academic integrity. I want to contribute to the conversation of academic integrity as I have always been interested in furthering educational access, but the essential first step to expanding educational access is encouraging students to want to learn. Prior research on academic integrity has been largely on students in higher education and relied on quantitative and self-reported data. Through this project, I aim to fill these gaps by perform an experiment in three different high schools across California to investigate the influence of teacher messaging on student perceptions and tendencies to cheat.

I am aiming to answer three main research questions in this project:

1) What are students’ perceptions of cheating? 

2) How do social messages from authority figures guide students’ evaluations of cheating? 

3) How do students’ evaluations of cheating guide their decisions to cheat?

This week I am working on recording some of the data we received from the first high school where we ran our experiment and throughout the next few weeks I will continue prepping material for the other high schools and analyzing the data we get from those experiments.

More details will be posted in my blog post next week. Stay tuned!