What Contributes to College Students’ Cheating? A Study of Individual Factors

To better understand the multiple individual factors that contribute to college cheating, we undertook a multivariate analysis of a national sample of 2,503 college students. Our findings indicated that demographic characteristics (e.g., gender, socioeconomic status, and year in college), character qualities (e.g., lack of self-control, others-oriented life purpose), college experience (e.g., academic preparation, extracurricular activities involvement, and working), and student perceptions and attitudes (e.g., attitude toward academic cheating, perception of faculty’s actions against cheating and cheating environment) are all significantly associated with academic cheating.     

Synagogues without rabbis or Christians? Ancient institutions beyond normative discourses

Abstract

This article focuses on a problem that tends to afflict, especially but not exclusively, historical narratives involving written sources celebrated as normative texts in contemporary religious communities. The religious authority ascribed to such texts is often entangled in claims about historical phenomena, resulting in ideological support of specific narratives nourished within religious communities as not only religiously significant but also historically true. Such assumptions in turn sustain aspects of religious identities and thus fulfil the social function of maintaining the status quo within and between communities. Because of their contemporary usefulness, these types of normative narratives are liable to bleed into scholarly reconstructions too, complicating the academic search for historical scenarios untouched by the needs of societies unknown to the ancients. This study aims to illustrate the problems involved through an exercise in which sources that speak to a specific historical question – the nature of ancient synagogues – but which later attained normative status within religious communities, are removed from the historical archive. The reconstruction offered, based on sources with no direct relationship to the continuing histories of Judaism and Christianity, yields a very different picture than the one commonly embraced today. The exercise also indicates the value of re-reading the sources previously removed from a new perspective, which may enrich the religious communities in question as they seek to understand their own history and identity, as well as one another.     

Linking daily ethical leadership to followers’ daily behaviour: the roles of daily work engagement and previous abusive supervision

The aim of this study was to advance literature on ethical leadership towards its day-level application. Daily ethical leadership is defined as ethical leadership behaviours a leader exhibits on a given day. Beneficial effects of daily ethical leadership on daily helping behaviour and daily counterproductive work behaviour via daily work engagement were examined. Furthermore, yesterday’s abusive supervision was postulated to moderate the impact of today’s ethical leadership on work engagement indicating moderated mediation. The relationship between daily ethical leadership and daily work engagement should be stronger when previous abusive supervision was high. This model was tested using an experience sampling methodology spread over 5 working days. The sample consisted of 241 employees from different organizations. Results supported the beneficial indirect impact of daily ethical leadership on daily helping through strengthening daily work engagement. The indirect effect was non-significant for daily counterproductive work behaviour. Consistent with theoretical assumptions, both indirect effects were strongest with high previous abusive supervision and diminished when previous abusive supervision was low. Implications for leadership research and managerial practice are discussed.     

Taking a children’s rights perspective on children’s spirituality

Abstract

The right to spiritual development has had little attention in public educational policy. This is more challenging, considering the fact of increasing religious diversity and the focus on spirituality and religion in that context, as well as the way the spiritual is mentioned in documents on children’s rights. This article traces the development from the first documents on the rights of the child and responses to these documents. It is argued that educational policy and practice should pay more attention to the way children’s spirituality is included in the documents. This is an issue of general education as well as of moral philosophy. The article concludes with a claim: spiritual development is a matter of survival and flourishing as human beings, and considering this in the framework of children’s rights could mean exploring spiritual sources in one’s own faith as well as in other faiths.