Student leadership, academic integrity on tap at Ethics Center event

KALAMAZOO, Mich.—A doctoral candidate will address the connections between student leadership and academic integrity when she speaks later this month as part of the Western Michigan University Center for the Study of Ethics in Society's spring 2016 lecture series.

Cecelia Parnther, a doctoral associate in the WMU Department of Educational Leadership, Research and Technology, will speak at 4 p.m. Tuesday, March 22, in the Brown and Gold Room of the Bernhard Center. Her presentation, titled "Student Leadership in Academic Integrity," is free and open to the public.

Clear policies critical

Research shows that clear policies and educational programming are necessary for students, faculty and staff to promote academic honor and integrity. Academic misconduct is damaging to institutional reputation, the quality and legitimacy of academic programs, and to the moral development of students.

Parnther will discuss how some of the more successful strategies to prevent cheating have been found in institutions with academic honor policies relying on peer response and intervention, as found in academic honor code settings.

To examine how students express their role in preventing cheating and promoting academic honor, Parnther has conducted a content analysis of publicly available resources, including social media sites, institution homepages, and student newspaper articles of 10 institutions to describe the ways student honor code leaders present the concept of academic integrity to their peers. Her presentation will summarize the results of this study to provide information on the changing nature of academic misconduct, identify strategies that institutions use to engage students in promoting integrity and use the student response to inform peer education on academic integrity on campus.

Cecelia Parnther

In her role as a doctoral associate, Parnther supports the Broncos FIRST project, a federally funded grant program promoting student success in higher education housed in the Center for Research on Instructional Change in Postsecondary Education.

She also has served as a part-time faculty member and provides faculty research support in higher education leadership. She holds a Master's of Education in Higher Education Administration from Loyola University Chicago and is also a King Chavez Parks Future Faculty Fellow. Her research is focused on academic integrity initiatives in higher education.

For more information, visit wmich.edu/ethics.

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