Academic Norms Education And Its Institutional Arrangements

With the background of both knowledge economy and higher education popularization, and influenced by the policy of enrolling expansion of university students, the undergraduates and postgraduates are less qualified than before, and the academic misconducts are happening with increasing frequency. Academic norms education is beneficial to develop students’proper academic behavior; strengthening academic norms education to improve quality of personnel training, therefore, is becoming an urgent task now. Most preceding studies elaborate on academic ethics and those elements influencing students’academic norms, with a focus on various academic deceits and their specific reasons. This study, however, from the perspective of education, examines the objective causes that affect the abidance by the academic norms, considers that the purpose of the academic norms education is to teach students to be honest scholarship, and researches academic norms education as a holistic system. It’s a systematic study of the academic norms education, making up for the deficiency of domestic research in this area. Study based on the survey data; research findings generated from practice, which can provide useful ideas for improving university personnel training quality, prevention and controlling student academic misconduct, and can be a useful guidance for practice.This study focuses on academic norms education and its institutional arrangement, and develops at two levels, i.e., history and reality, theory and practice. At the historical level, through a brief review of the traditional education of academic norms, this study tries to sum up the differences between Chinese and foreign education of academic norms. At the practical level, through a questionnaire interviews and documentary analysis, it tries to learn about the concept, organization and measures of the academic norms education, to explore its current situation and problems, and to examine its role in the educational management system. At the theoretical level, it explores the connotation, significance, idea, and objective of academic norms education. At the practical level, through the discussion of the main content, responsibility, approaches and methods, institutional guarantee and other issues of academic norms education, it tries to build a system for academic norms education, by using institutionalism and the science of education, sociology and other related theories.Adopting a research method of combining documentary analysis and empirical research, with the comparative analysis and normative analysis in combination. By questionnaires and interviewing teachers and students of three different types of universities---"985Project","211Project" universities in Kiangs Province and provincial universities, this study investigates the objective conditions and subjective attitudes of academic norms education, with the aims of understanding teachers and students’ representative concepts of academic norms education and system construction in colleges and universities. With the combination of relevant provisions of academic norms education on these university websites, this study analyzes the education effect and understanding the current situation on academic norms education. Through the collection of academic norms education information announced on the its websites of several famous research universities of USA, Hong Kong and Taiwan, this study explores the differences of education of academic norms home and abroad.By analyzing the survey data and text information, this study suggests that, domestic colleges and universities has established academic norms system and carry out the corresponding education generally, and helpful for guiding students to study and research honestly. It has a close relationship between the actual effect of academic norms education, university’s attention and related institutional arrangements. The current main problem of domestic academic norms education, which affects the actual effect of education, reflected in several aspects:the basic issues of academic norms education not yet formed a unified understanding, academic norms education not yet formed systematic institutional arrangement, and lack of’human consciousness’in academic norms education. Fundamentally speaking, one reason is we know a little about the purpose and its importance of academic norms education, the other is the deficiency of a systematic arrangement for the purpose of the fundamental solution.Based on the above study adopted sociological institutionalism definition of the system, from both the organization and the operational level to build the academic norms system of education.This study is divided into five parts:Part one, i.e., the first chapter "Introduction", describes the reason for this topic choosing and the significance of this research, summarizes the domestic and foreign research status, introduces the overall design of the study, and clarifies the research questions and methods.Part two, academic norms education and its development trend, is composed by the second chapter "Overview of Academic Norms Education" and the third chapter "Academic Norms Education is from’implicitly’to’explicitly’". From various aspects of academic norms education, such as its targets, objectives and main features, this part explores its connotation and concept, analyzes the role of academic and ideological education. By using the method of documentary analysis, it analyzes China’s educational tradition of academic norms and compares its difference with foreign traditional education, indicating the necessity from "implicitly" to "explicitly" in the background of knowledge economy and higher education popularization. On the basis of discussing Hayek’s "spontaneous order", it states some basic theoretical issues, such as the possibility and measures of institutional arrangement of academic norms education.Part three, the current situation and problems of academic norms education, is composed of chapter4"Current Situation of Academic Norms Education" and Chapter5"Problems of Academic Norms Education and Reasons". This part investigates the real situation of the implementation of academic norms, and analyzes its effects from the perspectives of students’ cognition, compliance of academic norms, institution and measures of academic norms education. Through the collection of academic norms education information on its websites of several famous research universities, this part explores the differences of academic norms education home and abroad. In this foundation, it summarizes current problems of academic norms education in the aspects of ideology, institutional design, and practices, reflecting causes of the problem from the perspectives of the education management, it points out the importance of building a clear concept for academic norms education system.The fourth part is composed of chapter6,"the Conception and System of Academic Norms Education". According to the current situations, main problems and cause analysis of academic norms education, this part elaborates the educational philosophy mainly from the perspectives of its objective, academic enlightenment education, and educational theory. This part also discusses the basic premise and specific requirements of the educational system design from the perspectives of basis, values orientation, human characteristics, environmental factors, responsibility of roles, operational possibilities and effectiveness. A specific framework of educational system is also built from the levels of organization and operation.The fifth part, specific framework of system of academic norms education, includes chapter7,"Content and Form of Academic Norms Education" and Chapter8,"Organizational Guarantee and Cultural Environment of Academic Norms Education". This part explores its basic issues, i.e., operational and organizational systems. It elaborates the main contents of the academic norms education, i.e., ideological quality, knowledge and skills, and practical operation. The organizational and specific forms of the academic norms education are also extracted and explained in this part. It also elaborates the responsibility of academic management institutions and teachers, from the perspectives of a sound system of academic norms, the establishment of academic misconduct prevention and control system, the establishment of training and appraisal system for teachers, the build-up of credibility system and cultural environment. Besides, this part also explores the basic conditions of academic norms education from’implicitly’to’explicitly’through discussions of the relationship among institution, internalization and culture.