Abstract:

The issue of school cheating has been the focus of many experts and scientists working in the field of pedagogical sciences almost all over the world in recent decades. In our study, we focus on evaluating the issue of motives for school cheating from the perspective of teachers and from the perspective of high school students. Motivational context is a part of every individual's life, it is a necessary source of his performance in every area and an individual without deeply rooted positive motivation cannot live fully and meaningfully. School cheating must be perceived in a broad context that transcends the boundaries of pedagogy or didactics. In the study, we focus on identifying and subsequently analyzing the motives that lead high school students to cheat in the process of reviewing and evaluating their school performance. It should be recalled that the level of school cheating is also affected by societal tendencies towards fraud as such, and also the current trends of increased demands for high performance of the individual and his/her success to competition.

The author of the study is based on a theoretical analysis of the issue of school cheating, he analyzes and then interprets the findings of the empirical research with an impact on educational practice. Through the research, he ascertained the attitudes and opinions of secondary school teachers and students towards the preferred motives for school cheating. A total of 905 high school students and 387 high school teachers participated in the research. Of that number, there were 383 boys (42.3%) and 522 girls (57.7%), of the teachers there were 102 men (26.36%) and 285 women (73.64%). In order to achieve the research objectives, we used the following research methods: analysis and synthesis of knowledge from relevant literature sources; questionnaire method - to find out the opinions and attitudes of secondary school teachers and students and mathematical-statistical methods of evaluating research results.

Analysis of the testimonies of research respondents, i.e. teachers and high school students confirmed that the preferences of the strongest motives for school cheating are the same for both groups of respondents and they are not mastering the curriculum due to non-learning and trying to achieve the best possible mark. The weakest motive for school cheating in both groups of respondents is principle cheating, what means that students do not cheat because they have good experience with cheating and they have not been caught cheating in the past.

Keywords:

School cheating, motives for school cheating, high school students, high school teachers.