Scholarship and Research Integrity (SARI) training has been both explicitly and implicitly present in my studies.

Collaborative Institutional Training Initiative (CITI)

The Collaborative Institutional Training Initiative (CITI) provides a five-hour interdisciplinary overview of ethical concerns in the gathering of research, including the processes for receiving approval to conduct studies with human subjects, the ethical implications of plagiarism and self-plagiarism, and the ethical dimensions of participating in research or publication with other graduate students. This course is required of all graduate students at Penn State. Please see my CITI Program Completion Report for more detailed information about CITI requirements and evidence of my successful completion.

Discipline-Specific Scholarship and Research Integrity Discussions

Discipline-specific scholarship as it relates to the higher education program and my particular course of study has been both explicit and implicit within the program. In terms of explicit training, the H ED 596: Capstone Experience requires five hours of discipline-based instruction. Due to the professional-practitioner focus of the M. Ed. program, in the  the capstone course, the discipline-specific integrity manifested itself in two ways — a continuation of the discussion on research ethics and a discussion on professional integrity. Higher Education professionals may be held to a higher standards than other professions when it comes to plagiarism, as we must establish credibility through interaction with faculty by speaking their language — providing the same level of academic and research-based proof that the faculty expect in their fields. If a staff person needs to communicate with faculty in order to make an argument or persuade a faculty member to a correct course of action, the staff person must not only have the ability to apply theory or previous practice to the current situation to provide evidence of success, but also provide it in such a way that the faculty feels assured of the staff member’s credibility. Discussing these issues in class makes explicit the constant practice of collecting, analyzing, paraphrasing, and applying research that occurs in most academic courses.

Discipline-specific ethical information collection occurred in some of my other experiences, as well. I attended a SARI-sponsored talk on The Politics of Voice: Ethics and Narrative in Research (Chiles, 2016). Through the frameworks of other writers, Chiles led a discussion that explored how using stories as data in qualitative methods can silence voices, perspectives, and interests of research subjects if the researcher does not take care when extracting the data. I attended this SARI discussion at the same time as I was taking C I 597C: Narrative Research in Education, where similar ideas were presented and discussed from other scholars. In the context of higher education, I explore the ethical dilemmas of using stories in program review in my capstone paper, Narrative Inquiry in Post-Secondary Education Program Reviews.

When involved in investigating research methods and research methodologies at the graduate level, discussions on ethical scholarship and ethical professional practices occur both explicitly and organically. Discussions on ethical practices are very important, as graduate students incorporate the lessons from these discussions into the personal and professional identities.

Reference:

Chiles, R. (2016, February 2). The politics of voice: Ethics and narrative in research. State College: The Pennsylvania State University.