Digital Cheating Behaviours and Ethical Tendencies of Teacher Candidates

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to define the digital cheating behaviours and ethical tendencies of education faculty students and to test if there is a significant correlation between these two. The study is designed as a quantitative correlational study. The data is collected through two scales; one of them is developed by Stephens, Young and Calabrese (2007) and was adapted into Turkish by the researchers and the second one is the Ethical Tendencies Scale developed by Koçyiğit & Karadağ (2016). The population of the study is 274 university students enrolled to the summer term school of an education faculty in the Aegean region of Turkey. The sample of the study consists of 101 students, 72 (71.3%) of whom are female and 29 (28.7%) are male. The sample was taken using convenience sampling technique. After the data was collected, the validity and reliability of the scales were tested, and they were found to be valid and reliable. According to the findings there is a significant correlation between plagiarism-improper citing factor and teleological ethics factor (r_s=.276, p=.034) and cheating-forgery factor and virtue ethics (r_s=-.205, p=.039).