STEM students’ Academic Integrity in The HyFlex Learning Environment

Yovav Eshet1, Nomy Dickman, Yossi Ben Zion

This study analysed how students’ personality traits and course attendance preferences impact academic integrity in the HyFlex learning environment. The HyFlex course design provides both semi-directional and bi-directional student-lecturer communication, therefore allowing students to save time, avoid costly commutes and course conflicts. Differences in academic outcomes have been reported between students who chose hybrid or F2F HyFlex and those who chose to attend remotely (Green, 2021), yet little is known about the correlates of unethical student behaviour across the different HyFlex attendance modes. Choosing the mode of attendance can be motivating for students, but can also lead to faulty outcomes (Drea, 2022), such as seeking out bugs and loopholes in submission systems and exploiting them. Although many contributing factors to academic dishonesty have been cited in the literature, there is no consensus regarding its primary cause. Some have emphasised either situational factors or individual characteristics, such as students’ demographic and personality traits, and another line of research has focused on the interaction between situational and individual variables as predictors of academic dishonesty (Peled et al., 2019). The research sample consisted of 535 (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics) STEM undergraduate students that were given a choice among taking their courses face-to-face (F2F), online, or a hybrid combination of both. The Big Five Inventory and the Academic Integrity Inventory were administered through online questionnaires to STEM students. The findings show that emotional stability and agreeableness positively relate to academic integrity irrespective of attendance mode. So do conscientiousness and agreeableness in the hybrid environment. Conversely, the primarily F2F attendance mode and the personality trait of extraversion are tied to markedly low levels of academic integrity. We conclude that unveiling students’ personality traits associated with ethical behaviour would be beneficial when designing HyFlex courses in different learning environments, whether human (F2F), machine-made (online) or a combination of both (hybrid). This, in turn, contributes to better higher quality education and enhances academic integrity.