Meta-Analyses on Teachers? and Students? Views on Academic Integrity and a Way Forward

This paper presents a metanalyses on teachers? and students? awareness, their understanding and evaluation of the situation about academic integrity and the proposals to improve the situation in higher education by the experts in the field from different Universities of Latvia. The study is based on the analyses on two previous studies carried out by the team of researchers of Daugavpils University, Latvia. The first study was focusing on the awareness of social science teachers about academic integrity in regional higher education institutions in Latvia. This study included in depth exploration of the awareness of teachers, their conceptual understanding, evaluation of academic integrity among students and teachers, the analyses of the most frequent barriers to academic integrity among students and teachers, as well as the evaluation of communication of academic integrity politics in higher education. While the first study examines academicians perspectives and focuses on policies and procedures of academic integrity in higher institutions (HI), and whether the current policies and procedures are satisfactory as evaluated by the academic staff members to prevent plagiarism among students and staff members in higher education institutions, the other study was focusing on students? perspectives, their awareness and understanding about academic integrity in regional higher education institutions in Latvia. The questions were related to their awareness of academic integrity, evaluation of the politics about academic integrity and its implementation in higher education, as well as ways how to promote academic integrity in their institution. The current study offers meta evaluation of the situation based on the research findings of two previous studies by the experts in the field. The methodology employed in this study involves semi-structured interviews with three experts in the field about the situation with the academic integrity in the regional higher education institutions of Latvia. This paper contributes to the existing debate of academic integrity and how universities can respond to this emergent concern.