STUDENTS' PERCEPTION OF PLAGIARISM: CASE STUDY OF ACADEMIC INTEGRITY FORMATION

Abstract

The issue of maintaining academic integrity and preventing plagiarism is in the focus of attention of higher education institutions. The consideration of these issues have been actualized under the conditions of Covid-19, because with the transition to a distance form of education, the temptation of dishonest use of data from the Internet by students has increased. Higher education institutions are developing various strategies to prevent plagiarism in student works. This study presents an example of the formation of academic integrity during graduate studies at the National University of Life and Environmental Sciences of Ukraine. The need has been updated and the methodology for applying an educational approach (a distinction is made between educational and educational approaches) to the use of text-matching software (the Unicheck plagiarism detection tool built into the LMS Moodle has been used) for preventing plagiarism in student papers has been developed. During the approbation of the developed methodology in the process of studying the discipline of the students' choice "Scientific communication in graduate research", a positive correlation has been found between the pedagogical intervention and students' understanding of ethical academic practice. As a result of the survey of 146 graduate students (80 students from the intervention group and 64 students from the control group), the effectiveness of the application of the author's method has been proven: a significant difference has been determined between the point marks regarding students' confidence in preventing plagiarism and their practical confirmation among students who worked according to the author's method (the intervention group, indicators are significantly higher) and those who were trained using the educational approach (informing according to the policies and procedures determined by the university). It is suggested that the use of a combination of enlightening and educational approaches based on which pedagogical support for the independent use of text-matching software in the process of studying individual disciplines or modules is based on a change in the attitude of students to the use of a software tool for detecting plagiarism from an evaluation tool in favor of receiving feedback, which can help higher education institutions improve academic integrity.