It is expected that education stakeholders, including students and teachers, should follow and promote academic honesty. Therefore, to address this relatively new concept, this dissertation examines how academic honesty is perceived and promoted by humanities teachers of the Diploma Program (DP) at an IB school in Kazakhstan. I used a qualitative research design to answer the following research questions: How do DP humanities teachers experience academic honesty at an IB school in Kazakhstan.
What practices do DP humanities teachers use in the classroom to promote students' academic honesty at one IB school in Kazakhstan. Insights may be useful both for the specific school and also for future studies to address issues of academic honesty and the related concept, academic misconduct. Future research on academic honesty is also suggested to include additional stakeholders to provide a picture of a whole school, as well as challenges and successes in promoting academic honesty from different perspectives.
Introduction
One of the problems of academic dishonesty is the lack of awareness about academic honesty among all stakeholders in education, such as students, parents, teachers and school administration, with policy makers (Bernard, Whitley & Keith-Spiegel, 2012). Therefore, Kazakhstan's educational stakeholders should be aware of academic honesty in order to develop the educational system. Moreover, the idea of enforcing academic honesty was realized later than in Western countries.
Overall, this chapter introduced the background information, purpose of the study, and research questions about academic honesty. The fourth chapter provides an analysis of the main results of the research into teacher perceptions and the promotion of academic honesty. The fifth chapter discusses the main findings of the study and connects them to previous research on academic honesty.
Literature Review
Therefore, there is evidence showing a difference between academic honesty and academic misconduct (Bretag et al., 2014, p. 1150). The following provides an overview of the four periods of academic honesty according to Gallant (2008). In summary, IB is strict about academic honesty among all stakeholders in the educational process.
According to East and Donnelly (2014), the culture of academic honesty should be promoted among all educational stakeholders (p. 1). At the same time, the commitment of the students and other members plays an important role in academic honesty messages. However, most of the research conducted has found negative results regarding students' and teachers' understanding and practice of academic honesty.
Research Design
By offering the instrumental case study, the researcher sought to raise awareness of the IB DP Humanities teachers' perceptions and promote academic honesty, so as to clearly understand (perceive) and vigorously implement (practice) academic honesty in their classes. Thus, this type of sampling helped to see different perspectives offered by humanities teachers of the diploma program at an International Baccalaureate school in Kazakhstan. The selected sample helped analyze the issue from the perspective of humanities teachers of the Diploma Program, with responses further analyzed to identify their understanding and practice of academic honesty.
All participants have at least two years of teaching experience in the IB program. By conducting interviews, the researcher sought to explore how academic honesty is perceived and promoted by humanities teachers of the Diploma Program at one International Baccalaureate school in Kazakhstan. In addition, curriculum (unit plans) analysis was conducted as an additional tool to identify how humanities teachers of the Diploma Program promote academic honesty in their subjects after the interviews to avoid subjectivity from the researcher's perspective.
After conducting the interviews, curriculum analysis was conducted with the help of online curricula provided by the participants. After obtaining the school's permission, the researcher sent a recruitment letter (see Appendix C) to the entire Humanities department with all the criteria and information needed for further interviews. After conducting the interviews, the audio recorded materials were password protected, while the paper version of the interviews and transcripts are stored in a locked location.
In addition, the reciprocity of the research for the participants was mentioned due to the use of the results for them in their pedagogical practice. Based on the responses of the participants during the interview, we analyzed the syllabi, and the main purpose of the syllabi analysis was to determine whether the different syllabi included the topic of academic honesty. It is important to note that other people cannot have access to the interview transcripts either.
After conducting the interviews, the audio-recorded materials were password protected on the researcher's personal computer, while the paper version of the interviews and transcripts were stored in a locked location for three years.
Analysis
Afterwards, these 49 unique codes were further consolidated into nine categories, which were further grouped into three main themes with two sub-themes each (see Table 2). The three main themes found include 1) Perception of academic honesty; 2) Successes in promoting academic honesty; 3) Challenges in promoting academic honesty. Kazakhstan's secondary education system still lacks full understanding and practice of academic honesty which challenges its promotion to its stakeholders. IB DP Humanities subjects found their program on academic honesty and this is one of the fundamental requirements of the IB which helps to promote this successfully.
The stakeholders of the educational process help to support each other and to successfully promote and practice academic honesty. This latter article was particularly relevant for exploring teachers' perceptions and practices of academic honesty. I reviewed the curricula for topics with lessons related to academic honesty and its promotion in the classroom.
The process also included reading papers on the terms "academic honesty" and "honesty." Sometimes, there was limited information about the process, such as with units using internal assessment. The internal evaluation process allowed me to see which actions are against academic honesty, which are following the rules of academic honesty. However, the curriculum of each subject reflects the IB program's requirements for academic integrity.
Each curriculum must follow the rules of the academic honesty policy both in the classroom and during DP assessments and exams. The excerpt below shows the requirements of academic honesty in PD (see Figure 3, for the full table, see Appendix F). Excerpt from academic honesty in the Diploma Program (International Baccalaureate, 2014a, p. 19; see Appendix F for full table).
Consequently, document analysis clarified the respondents' answers and showed evidence of participants' promotion of academic honesty in their curriculum (see Appendix G).
Findings
Six out of seven participants mentioned APA style with proper referencing and citing sources as a key element of academic honesty. Based on the participants' responses, honesty and accountability can be one of the main elements in promoting academic honesty. Almost all participants cited APA reference with citations and awareness of intellectual property as key elements of academic integrity.
The respondents provided a long list of skills that are developed through the promotion of academic honesty. Three of the participants clearly pointed to the issue of not following academic honesty rules by the teachers. One of the main factors in promoting academic honesty is its widespread influence among the school community.
This section presents DP Humanities teachers' successes in promoting academic honesty in their classroom and at school. There is a special policy on academic honesty which is one of the main requirements to become an IB school. In addition to vignettes, participants mentioned that the role of the school community is crucial in promoting a culture of academic honesty.
Discussion and Conclusion
So there appears to be a strong link between promoting academic honesty and skill development. According to the literature, educational background and environment influence the perception and promotion of academic honesty. The relevance of social constructionism will be further discussed in the sections below, which highlight the challenges and successes in promoting academic honesty.
Another difficulty teachers face in promoting academic honesty is the collectivist approach of students. Another challenge in promoting academic honesty is the lack of the concept of academic honesty in Kazakhstan's education system. Overall, this section has discussed teachers' challenges in promoting academic honesty in relation to the conceptual framework that consists of Vygotsky's social constructivist theory.
Thus, the person's environment plays a major role in both the perception and promotion of academic honesty. The IB explicitly requires the promotion of academic honesty in all subjects of the DP program. Furthermore, participants explained the need to promote academic honesty in their subjects due to the demands of the curriculum.
This finding supports the idea of a holistic approach to the culture of academic honesty in the school that was. All seven participants emphasized that timely notification of academic misconduct to administrators affects the effectiveness of promoting academic honesty. The findings showed that cooperation with the school community has a positive effect on the successful promotion of academic honesty.
This would provide additional rich data on the perceptions of other teachers and the promotion of academic honesty to deepen our knowledge. In summary, participants perceive academic honesty as described in the literature review. Title: "Teachers' perceptions and promotion of academic honesty: A qualitative case study of humanities teachers within a Diploma Program (DP) in an International Baccalaureate (IB) school in Kazakhstan".
