I found this article from a post on Cool Cat Teacher Blog September 19th about student cheating and their attitudes towards cheating. The article identifies the top five ways that students cheat electronically and goes on to discuss that many of today’s students do not see this as cheating.
They quote a survey by Common Sense Media that states:"35% of teens use their cell phones to cheat by:
*26% store info on their phone and look at it while taking a test
*25% send text messages to friends, asking for answers
*17% take pictures of a test – and then send it to their friends
*20% use their phones to search for answers on the Internet
*48% warn friends about a pop quiz with a phone call or text message"
I am wondering how prevalent this is in our district. I don’t have any data and I am not aware of conversations where administrators are seeing this as a significant issue. Are our students not engaging in this behavior in similar percentages or perhaps they are more adept and avoid being caught? I would be interested in your experiences. Is this just a high school and college issue or are similar behaviors and attitudes seen in younger students?
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2 comments:
We currently do not allow cell phones in the middle school. My assumption would be that if they were allowed, 7th grade students would most certainly partake in the extracurricular cheating type activities listed in your blog. Many of them currently lack the research skills to look for answers on the internet, but they have mastered texting at this point!
I am not surprised that students use cell phones to cheat but I am surprised that they don't consider it cheating. Cheating by sending text messages or by storing information in their phones is bad, but really just modernized passing notes and using cribsheets in my opinion. It's bad, but it's not different than it was in the past--though maybe a little less discret I guess.
Warning friends about a pop quiz with a phone call or text message isn't really any different than telling someone in the hall--though again modernized in the sense that it's easier to mass tell people instantly.
Searching for answers on the internet though is a whole new ball game. I wonder how effective it can be though... I guess as the Internet connections on our phones get faster and faster this will be more of a problem.
However, maybe we should use this as a teaching point to our methods of assessment. If we are just asking students to simply recall information then them using cell phones is a problem. However if we're asking students to do higher level thinking like analyzing and other TS/HOM then how much use would the Internet really be?
Though I don't always model this philosophy as I should, I think that students should be open to use all the resources they can get their hands on when being assessed and we should be challenging them to apply their knowledge instead of just recall it. ....In fact, thinking about the test I just gave today, I think I need to do some re-working on my assessment of this unit for next year.
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