Faculty perspectives about incorporating academic integrity into engineering courses

This study examined how a professional development workshop affected faculty members' perspectives about incorporating academic integrity into their engineering courses. Embedded in the context of a new initiative at a large Mid-Atlantic University that aims to enhance engineering students' understanding of academic integrity and professional ethics, the workshop featured three aspects: 1) enhancing faculty members' self-efficacy in teaching academic integrity and professional ethics; 2) facilitating their development of instructional strategies for teaching integrity and ethics; and 3) supporting their classroom implementation of instructional plans. Seven faculty participants were interviewed after they implemented the new instructional plans in the semester following the workshop. Three major themes emerged from inductive analysis of interview transcripts. First, all participants reported that the workshop helped them become more aware of the importance of incorporating academic integrity into their teaching and were more reflective on how to effectively discuss this critical issue with their students. Second, after the workshop, participants made several changes in their courses and applied a variety of strategies to incorporate academic integrity into four aspects of their teaching: course syllabus, classroom discussion, assignments, and exams. Last, participants discussed several challenges when incorporating academic integrity into their courses, such as limited class time and unexpected extra workload. This work constituted our first steps in facilitating the discussion of academic integrity in engineering courses and supporting faculty members as they prepare students for ethical professional conducts. By exploring faculty members' perspectives about teaching academic integrity and the changes in their instructional design, this study provided important implications for future ethics education in engineering.