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Mid-Atlantic Regional Technology in Education Consortium
1301 Cecil B. Moore Ave.
Ritter Annex 9th Floor
Temple University - CRHDE
Philadelphia, PA 19122
800-892-5550
215-204-5130 (fax)
General Inquires:
Laurence Peters
Judith Stull
Technical Assistance:
Barry Mansfield
Professional Development:
Joan Pasternak
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Temple University Center for Research
in Human Development and Education |
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Cheating Goes Hi-Tech
141
by
Barry Mansfield
Temple University
As technology becomes increasingly pervasive, administrators and teachers are faced with a significant and elusive problem in managing their students’ activities on the Internet. Clear-cut ethical decisions in the physical world seem less so in the cyber world. For example, most children would never consider walking into a video rental store to steal a DVD off the shelf. However, these same children might not think twice about illegally downloading a movie from the Internet.
This ethical dilemma in K–12 schools is most evident in the growing incidence of plagiarism facilitated by the use of technology. Plagiarism is not a new phenomenon and had existed in schools well before the development of the Internet. However, the most basic motive for plagiarizing someone else’s writing and ideas from the Internet today may be that it is simply easier to do than ever before.
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A recent study (Oliver, 2004) confirmed that seventh- and eighth-grade students’ general moral reasoning differed widely from their technology-specific values. While a majority of the students’ explanations for their general moral reasoning, “were likely to focus on issues of relationships and exchanges as reciprocal and mutual,” their reasoning shifted radically when thinking about technology. More than half of the students surveyed were found to have less complex values concerning technology, “indicative of instrumental thinking about moral situations” (p. 5). In other words, these children were more likely to act on their own self-interests when justifying their behavior on computers, which is reflected in comments such as, “If people don’t want us to download stuff, maybe they shouldn’t put that stuff on the [I]nternet”; “There is a small chance they will catch you”; and “I don’t care what my parents say, I am old enough to make my own decisions.”
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