Students’ Understanding of Referencing Conventions and Terminological Denotations Associated with the Ethical Use of Information

Abstract The aim of this study is to investigate university students’ understanding of referencing conventions and terminological denotations associated with the ethical use of information. A questionnaire survey was conducted to collect data from the final year undergraduate and master’s students at a public university in Bangladesh. In addition to demographic and academic information, students were asked to respond to 13 task-based statements to indicate whether referencing are required for them. They were also asked to write down the definitions for 10 terms related to ethical practices of information use. For referencing and definitional tasks, each correct answer or definition was given a score of 1, while each incorrect answer was given a score of 0. The item difficulty index was used for analyzing the correctness score for each referencing and definitional answer. Finally, a negative binomial regression model was used on the total referencing and definitional scores to predict the students’ correctness scores. A total of 189 students participated in the survey. It was found that the majority of students never attended library orientations, information literacy instructions and academic writing workshops. The findings showed that students’ correctness score for the referencing tasks was relatively high, but their correctness score was poor for the definitional answers. It appeared that students from the engineering and technology faculty and those who were enrolled in the master’s programs had significantly higher correctness score. The most common form of unethical practices by students included allowing assignments to be copied by their peers or vice versa. While academic pressure was regarded as one of the main reasons for unethical practices, the majority of students felt guilty for such wrongdoings and committed to be more careful in the future.