Marie Carroll

Who cheats at university? A self-report study of dishonest academic behaviours in a sample of Australian university students

The present study investigated the dishonest academic behaviours of Australian university students (N = 954) and their relationships with demographic factors, academic policy advised to students, academic self-efficacy, and academic orientation. It was hypothesised that higher levels of dishonesty would be associated with low learning-orientation, high grade-orientation, low academic self-efficacy and nonreceipt of information about the rules of cheating and plagiarism. Descriptive analyses revealed high levels of three types of self-reported academic dishonesty: cheating, plagiarism and falsification. Regression analyses revealed demographic variables, academic orientation and academic self-efficacy to have differential predictive value for the three types of dishonesty, underlining the argument that it is misleading to measure academic dishonesty as a unidimensional construct. The results are discussed in terms of implications for strategic interventions and university policy formulation.

Effect of overlearning on the feeling of knowing is more detectable in within-subject than in between-subject designs.

Conflicting results in the literature concerning the influence of overlearning on subsequent feeling of knowing (FOK) judgments for unrecallable items were resolved in an experiment that contrasted within-subject and between-subject designs. In the between-subject design, participants gave FOK judgments about items all of which had been learned to a criterion of either one or six correct recalls 4 weeks earlier. In the within-subject design, these judgments were made about the same items, half of which had been correct once and half six times. Results showed that the effect of overlearning on FOK ratings was more detectable in the within-subject design than in the between-subject design. It is suggested that future experiments on metacognition should use within-subject designs for maximal detectability of the effect of an independent variable on metacognitive judgments.

Reality monitoring for sexual abuse memories

The reality monitoring model of Johnson and Raye proposes that the phenomenal characteristics of memories for real and imagined events are utilized in reality monitoring judgements. This study examined the reality monitoring strategies utilized by subjects when remembering sexual abuse, and compared them with the strategies utilized for other types of events. Thirty-one subjects described how they knew that four different autobiographical events (a sexual abuse experience, another unrelated trauma experience, a social occasion, and an imagined event) had, or had not, happened. Sexual abuse experiences were found to elicit a unique reality monitoring response profile. This profile suggests that the characteristics of memory for sexual abuse may be more vivid than other memories. In addition, the profile for sexual abuse shows fewer contextual supporting memories than other real memories, and more psychological reasoning responses. The finding that emotional rehearsal can cause fading of perceptual detail was not found to hold for the long-term autobiographical memories that were the object of this study.

Monitoring the future: object and source memory for real and imagined events

In these experiments a memory-monitoring decision is made, whereby subjects must decide not only whether or not to-be-learned stimuli will be remembered—the focus of all of the past research into the Judgement of Learning (JOL)—but also whether they will be able to assess the source of those stimuli, as assessed by a new measure, Judgement of Source (JOS). In Experiment 1 subjects had to judge whether they would remember the occurrence and the source of items that were either seen or imagined. Although seen items were better remembered and sourced than imagined, subjects were unable to predict this outcome: they underestimated their ability to recall seen items and overestimated their ability to recall imagined items. In Experiment 2 subjects had to discriminate between self-performed or other-performed enacted or imagined events. We expected that the motor cues associated with overt performance should provide more sensory information than had the visual input in Experiment 1, and this should help subjects to discriminate between real and imagined items. As predicted, JOL magnitude showed that subjects were now able to predict accurately that they would recall more enacted events than imagined events. JOS magnitude showed that subjects incorrectly predicted that self-enactment would assist source memory compared to imagination. However, it was the source of other-focused events which was more accurately remembered. The results are discussed in terms of Koriats (1997) view about cue utility in making JOLs. Copyright

Influences on metamemory judgements

The principal aim of the experiments was to examine the effects of context on metamemory judgements such as judgement of learning (JOL) and on object-level memory (recall) for meaningful complex material. Three other variables known to affect metamemory judgements for word lists—degree of learning, delay of JOL, and study-test retention interval—were also examined. In Experiment 1, learning sentences in or out of a story context did not affect either metamemory judgements for material that was to be tested 2 or 6 weeks later, or object-level memory (cued recall). JOL ratings were, however, sensitive to a within-subject manipulation of amount of learning. Subjects accurately judged that their memory would be better for overleamed material. Delaying JOL for 24 hours compared to same-session JOL allowed subjects to more accurately assess the deleterious effect of long retention intervals on memory. In contrast to the lack of effect of contextualisation in Experiment 1, when context was manipulated as a within-subjects variable in Experiment 2, a test of cued-recall performance 4 weeks later showed that memory was significantly better for sentences learned in a story context than those learned in the context of related sentences. Despite this improvement in recall due to contextualisation, JOL ratings indicated that they were not able to predict in advance that they would demonstrate better memory for contextualised sentences. In addition to the new manipulation of contextualisation, these results confirm earlier findings with respect to JOL timing, amount of learning, and retention interval on memory and metamemory, and extend these findings to real-world complex material.

Attributions of Fluency in Fame Judgments by Younger and Older Adults

Judgments about stimulus characteristics are affected by enhanced processing fluency that results from an earlier presentation of the stimulus. By monitoring for an episodic source of processing fluency, younger adults can more easily avoid this influence than can older adults. In Experiment 1, older adults discounted the effects of fluency when task demands encouraged the use of analytic judgments based on general knowledge, rather than an appeal to episodic source monitoring. Younger subjects were not reliably affected by these same task demands and their judgments continued to be affected by processing fluency. In Experiment 2, introduction of more stringent demands led younger adults also to discount the effects of fluency. We conclude that the influence of processing fluency on younger and older adults varies, depending on whether memory for source or general knowledge is put forward in place of fluency as a basis for judgments.

The effects of self-reference on recognition and source attribution

Abstract This study uses a repeated measures design to examine the effects of the self on recognition and source attribution. Working in pairs, 30 undergraduate psychology student participants generated words themselves or listened to their partners generated item, and made metamemory judgments – judgments of learning and judgments of source – about their likelihood of recognising both the item and its source a week later. The generation task required them to produce in succession names of towns and names of occupations or hobbies of particular significance to themselves. At test, participants recognised, as old or new, words generated by themselves or their partner previously, along with a unique experimenter-generated list of distracter items. Additionally, they characterised each old response as being “remembered” (having memory qualities associated with sensory and contextual information) or “known” (seeming familiar but lacking contextual information). False alarm rates for remembered words suggeste...

The effect of context and metamemory judgements on automatic process in memory

These experiments examine two aspects of the automatic influences on memory as measured by target responding in the exclusion condition within the process dissociation framework. In Experiment 1, we examine the extent to which congruency between study and test contexts affects automatic processes in memory. In Experiment 2, we investigate qualitative differences in consciously controlled and automatic processing as indexed by metamemory judgements. In both experiments, a process-dissociation procedure was used to separate automatic and consciously controlled uses of memory in a stem completion task. In the study phase of Experiment 1, subjects read a passage from one of two directed perspectives. The subsequent stem completion task, which subjects performed while mindful of the study perspective, contained (a) old words congruent with the directed perspective, (b) old words congruent with a different (non-directed) perspective, and (c) words that had not been presented. Estimates of automatic influences for words congruent with the directed perspective were found to be greater than estimates for words incongruent with the directed perspective. These results provide evidence for the automatic or unconscious influences of meaning on task performance, which is uncontaminated by the influence of consciously controlled recollection which may occur in indirect memory tests. In Experiment 2, judgements of learning made prior to retrieval under inclusion and exclusion instructions were found to be different for consciously controlled and automatic processes, suggesting that memory as measured by the opposition (exclusion) procedure is involuntary and unconscious, with prospective monitoring of performance not sensitive to eventual performance.

Feelings of warmth during picture identification

Abstract Subjects performed a degraded picture identification task, in which some pictures had previously been intact or degraded, and in the same or a different pictorial form, and others were new. Number of trials to identification and feelings-of-warmth ratings during identification were the dependent measures. Half the subjects received instructions to anticipate the old pictures; the others were not informed that some of the pictures were old. Results showed that the informed group took longer to identify the pictures, but gave higher feeling-of-warmth ratings than those who were not informed. However, the feeling-of-warmth ratings were significantly greater only in the conditions in which then was less overlap in the study and test operations. Where there was greater overlap between study and test operations—the condition in which an identical picture previously shown in degraded form was re-presented for identification—feeling-of-warmth ratings were not different for the two groups. It is argued th...