Student Incivility in Higher Education

Observed frequently within higher education settings, student incivility need to be dealt with since they affect teaching-learning process adversely. The aim of this study is to determine the frequency of student incivility in higher education and coping techniques employed by academics. Both qualitative and quantitative data were collected together with a measurement tool developed by the researchers. The method of the research is a mixed method and qualitative and quantitative data were collected at the same time. A total of 250 academics working at universities in Turkey have voluntarily participated in the study. During the analysis process, construct validity concerning the quantitative data obtained from the data collection tool has been established through DFA, and parametric test statistics have been applied for data analysis. The results obtained from the study have indicated that not studying, playing with the cell phone, and not listening to the lecture are among the most frequent students’ uncivil behaviors the academic witness. A significant difference has been identified between the two independent variables of the research –“seniority & working period at the current university”and student incivility. The academics think that as seniority and working period at the same workplace increase, students show less of uncivil behaviors. “Verbal warning” has been noted as the most frequent method used by academics to deal with these kinds of behaviors. The implications of these findings for intervention design and development and further research are discussed.


INTRODUCTION
The word "incivility" in modern higher education is generally associated with discourtesy, disrespect, and violation of common manners. These uncivil behaviors that can be observed mutually during faculty-student interaction are specified as "incivility", and they influence teaching-learning process negatively by surfacing in various forms (Freyy-Knepp, 2012;Luparell, 2005;Miller, Katt, Brown & Sivo, 2014;. Clark and Springer (2007) define these behaviors as "a speech or action that is disrespectful or rude and that ranges from insulting remarks and verbal abuse to explosive and violent behaviors". The definitions of the concept reveal that a wide range of uncivil student behaviors should be addressed.
There are many studies showing which behaviors are uncivil student behaviors. In recent years, among the ever-increasing and most frequently observed students' uncivil behaviors -seen as a discomfort both by students and instructors within the higher education settings -are talking to others during the class, using cell phones during the lecture, being late to class or leaving early, sleeping, making sarcastic comments, and packing before the class is over (Ballard et al., 2018;Clark & Springer, 2007;Freyy-Knepp, 2012;Nordstrom, Bartels & Bucy, 2009). On the other hand; it is stated that behaviors like being unprepared, bored or indifferent (Survey Research at Indiana University, 2000) don't constitute serious flaws in classroom management, but they cause students to steer away from the learning environment when used repeatedly or by a great number of students (Nawraz & Makhdoom, 2019). Among other uncivil student behaviors lie class terrorism (namely, being selfabsorbed and missing in-class instructions), intimidation, (e.g. bully, abuse) and threat or violence (Burke, Karl, Peluchette, & Evans, 2014). However; it should be noted that these forms occur less than others (Alberts, Hazen & Theobald, 2010;. Research conducted to figure out the causes of such behaviors focus more on the reasons related to students and faculties. Kuhlenschmidt and Layne (1999) conclude that these behaviors stem from emotional (like divorce, dissension, and loss), physical, and cognitive (attention problems, seeing/hearing impairment, health issues, addiction, stress etc.) difficulties students go through. According to Alberts et.al. (2010), many students advancing to university from high school have false expectations and ideas about the nature of studying at a university. Besides, Alberts et.al. (2010) have stated that due to relatively tolerative parents, excessively flexible school environment and being momentary pleasure/satisfaction/fun driven, modern university student generation -graduates of the year 2000 or latergives the instructors incomparable hard time while teaching. Among the reasons stemming from faculties are physical settings and qualifications of instructors. For instance, Berger (2000) states that uncivil student behaviors are seen more within classes where instructors do not display social behaviors (making eye-contact, showing interest, establishing intimacy etc.). Results of the research have shown that the causes of the incivility originate from faculty as well as students.
The most significant mission of higher education is to help students improve a sense of communal and social responsibility by enhancing their knowledge and manners. Student incivility cause a change in the teaching-learning environment by transforming the dynamics of the environment and diverting students' attention away from studying (Hirschy & Braxton, 2004). Researches on uncivil student behaviors have been discussed in the Turkish literature mostly at primary, secondary and high school level from the perspective of classroom management (Elma, 2018;Tuncay, İnce & Sahin, 2019;Yıldırım & Aydın, 2019). There are limited researches as to student incivility in higher education (Gulec, 2013;Kocyigit & Erdem, 2019;Sapancı & Kuyumcu Vardar, 2018). On the other hand, Ustunluoglu (2013) investigated the perceptions and coping strategies of American-Turkish lecturers in relation to student misbehaviors comparatively, and the results showed similarities in both cultures. The problems encountered were cell phone use, inappropriate talking, inattentiveness, lack of participation and tardiness. In general, verbal warnings and the outlining of expectations were identified as the main coping strategies by both groups. This study also reveals similar problems in different cultures. Considering the potential for incivility and responses to affect higher education, in order to develop coping strategies more studies are needed at this level. Therefore, it's thought that identifying uncivil student behaviors in Turkish higher education and learning about the practice that instructors apply in order to solve these kinds of behaviors would contribute to the relevant body of literature. Based on these needs, the aim of this study is to determine the frequency of uncivil student behaviors in higher education and to identify the coping methods used by academics for these behaviors. Accordingly, answers have been sought for the following research questions:

1.
What are the most and least frequent uncivil student behaviors in higher education?
2. Do uncivil student behaviors vary significantly according to independent variables (gender, seniority, title etc.)?

3.
What are the most annoying uncivil student behaviors for academics and what are the methods to cope with these behaviors?

METHOD
This section consists of information regarding research method, participants, data collection tool, and analysis of data obtained from the study.

Research Design
This research has a "mixed method" design where qualitative and quantitative methods are utilized together. Teddlie and Tashakkori (2003) state that mixed type design studies can be seen as a third methodological move posing an alternative to quantitative and qualitative research designs. Creswell (2009) defines mixed method studies as a research design where both quantitative and qualitative data collection and analysis methods are combined together in a single study for the same purpose. Considered separately in terms of quantitative and qualitative methods, the research has a 'descriptive survey' model quantitatively, and a phenomenological design qualitatively. In descriptive survey, current conditions of the variables are specified (Karasar, 2017). This study has been conducted to determine the frequency and types of uncivil behaviors displayed by higher education learners across various variables. Phenomena manifest in various forms such as incidents, experiences, perceptions, tendencies, notions, and situations in the world we live in. They may need a comprehensive and elaborate examination (Yıldırım & Simsek, 2006). Treating "incivility" as a phenomenon that needs to be analyzed, this study was conducted to determine the types of uncivil student behaviors that academics have observed and to identify the methods they have been applying to tackle these misbehaviors.

Participants
Being one of the purposeful sampling methods, convenience sampling was used as the sampling method in this research. After granting research ethics committee approval(s), researchers talked to academics in person and handed in the data collection form to voluntary ones to be taken back in due course. Due to some difficulties within this process, adequate amount of data was not attained, thus forms were digitalized in order to reach out more academics. The aim was to reach a great number of participants by resending the forms at certain intervals. The data of the research were collected between 2018 and 2019 years, a total of 250 academics participated in the study. Demographic information concerning participants are shown in Table 1.  Table 1 indicates that participants are mostly female academics. A closer examination of the table shows that the participants are mostly assistant professors with a 10-year of seniority at the same faculty.

Data collection
The qualitative and quantitative data were collected at the same time in the research. In order to collect data quantitatively, a measuring tool developed by the researchers was used. In this sense, an extensive literature scanning was done to form the items of the data collection tool, and studies concerning the notion of "incivility" in international literature were analyzed. According to the study results, types of uncivil student behaviors were determined. Each of these behaviors was reified as a proposition and added to the item pool. After examining the item pool, some items were eliminated while others were edited into 61 propositions forming 3 sub-factors. Consisting of 17 items, the first sub-factor regards student misbehaviors towards instructors; composed of 31 items, the second subfactor concerns incivility student behaviors within the class environment; consisting of 13 items, the third sub-factor is about behaviors concerning personal state of students. Data distilled from these factors composed the quantitative aspect of the research. On the other hand, to collect to the qualitative data, the academics were asked the following 2 open-ended questions in the scale: (1) What are the uncivil student behaviors that he most frequently encountered? (2) What kind of methods do you use to deal with these behaviors? (3) Do you need any support to cope with uncivil student behaviors? Content validity of the scale developed by the researchers was established by consulting experts each working for different programs in the department of educational sciences. The scale was finalized based on these experts' opinions. Being a 5-point-likert-type scale, it scores the frequency of behaviors as (1) Never, (2) Rarely, (3) Sometimes, (4) Usually and (5) Always". Moreover, construct validity of the scale was established through confirmative factor analyses (CFA). Amos 16.0 statistics program was used for CFA. During confirmatory analysis, fit indices of the scale were checked to see whether they had relevant values. According to the data set, chi square value was calculated to be (χ 2 ) =4503.78 after DFA. The ratio between chi square and degree of freedom was found to be (χ 2 /d) =2.55. This ratio is advised to be smaller than 3 indicating good fit. Within this scope, the values obtained from CFA and their acceptance boundaries are shown in Table 2. As depicted in Table 2, among the adaptive values, especially the scores of GFI and CFI are outside the acceptable boundaries. The fact that especially χ 2 /d ratio produced a good value with respect to the model to be affirmed is a significant sign to confirm the construct validity of the scale. Simsek (2007) states that a full consensus hasn't been reached about which goodness of fit statistics is to be used in literature, and he emphasizes that there are warnings underpinning that different values should be accentuated and considered. Internal consistency coefficients were checked for the reliability of the scale. The internal consistency coefficient of the entire scale is .975 whereas it is .913, .959, and .932 for the first, second, and third factors respectively. When the internal consistency coefficients are .70 or more, reliability values can be considered good (Akbulut, 2010). The results of reliability and validity analyses show that data obtained from the scale is valid and reliable.

Data Analysis
During quantitative data analysis, SPSS statistics package software was used for scale items. Within this scope, primarily the scale was checked whether it showed normal distribution or not. The distribution obtained from the scale was within the normal distribution standards of skewness and kurtosis values -(skewness=-.50, kurtosis=.034). Along with skewness and kurtosis values, Kolmogorov-Smirnov and Shapiro-Wilk values of the scale were reviewed for normal distribution.
Though both values must be more than .05 for normal distribution, their values were less than .05 (Kolmogorov-Smirnov=.022; Shapiro-Wilk= .001). Akbulut (2010) stated that while skewness and kurtosis values are within the fixed boundaries, Kolmogorov-Smirnov and Shapiro-Wilk values can have different values compared to the normal ones, which doesn't cloud the normal distribution. Therefore, applying parametric method of analysis was deemed suitable since the distribution was considered normal during data analysis.
A high score acquired from sub-factors and the total of the scale indicates low levels of uncivil student behaviors while a low score underlines high levels of frequency. On the other hand, for qualitative data analysis, data compromised by a validity committee composed of scholars from the department of educational sciences were included, and themes whose observation points were 5 or more were evaluated as research findings.

Results
This section presents data analysis conducted in accordance with research questions and interpretations based on data analyses. Table 3 shows primarily the data acquired from the entire scale, and then uncivil student behaviors stated to be the most and least frequent are given under different sub-factors based on academics' opinions. For this purpose, arithmetic mean for each item was calculated, and the least and most frequent five uncivil student behaviors according to the total score were listed together with 3 uncivil student behaviors from each sub-factor.  Table 3 indicates that the most frequent uncivil behaviors are related to those listed in the 2 nd and 3 rd factors. Playing with the cell phone in the lecture, not studying, and not listening to the lecture are the ones that academics mentioned the most. Besides, the least uncivil behaviors belong with those in factor 1. Sexual harassment, threat, and insult are the least displayed behaviors. The most and least civil student behaviors according to the sub-factors are presented in the table below. As shown in Table 4, uncivil behaviors that students display the least are the ones towards academics. The most frequent uncivil student behaviors in this factor are keeping the academics busy in their offices unduly, gossiping about the academics, and putting the academics under psychological pressure. The most frequently observed uncivil behaviors towards the lecture were reported as not studying, playing with the cell phone etc. in the lesson, and not listening to the lecture. These behaviors are also among the most frequent uncivil student behaviors on the entire scale. In addition to this, when behaviors stemming from students' personal states are analyzed, they are similar to behaviors observed within the teaching process. Taking the easy way out perpetually, being distracted, and stolidity in the educational environment are the most frequent uncivil behaviors of this factor.

Research question 2: Do uncivil student behaviors show significant differences based on independent variables?
In accordance with this sub problem, uncivil behaviors were examined to see if they varied significantly across gender, seniority, workplace, working period, title, and class size. Significant differences based on these variables were evaluated separately for both the entire scale and subfactors. In this sense, no significant difference was found between uncivil student behaviors based on gender, workplace, title, and class size. However, there is a significant difference between the frequency of uncivil student behaviors and seniority of academics and their working period. Results regarding the difference seen in uncivil behaviors as for professional seniority are given in the table below.  Table 5 shows that uncivil behaviors within the sub-factors of teaching process and personal state of students vary significantly in terms of professional seniority. The same significant difference is also observed across the entire scale. There is a significant difference between the opinions of academics with a seniority of 20 years and above and the ones with a seniority of 6-10 years about uncivil student behaviors. A closer examination of means indicates that this difference militates in favor of academics with a seniority of 20 years and above. Namely, academics think that students display uncivil behaviors less as seniority grows. The same difference is also observed for the working periods of academics at their current universities. What can be distilled from the data set of the entire scale and sub-factors is that academics with long working experience (16-20 or 20 years and above) encounter uncivil student behaviors less compared to academics who have 1 to 5 years of experience at the same working place. Both results indicate that academics improving their academic knowledge and experience within years, gain competence over "teaching", "class management", and "communication".

Research question 3: What are the most annoying incivility student behaviors for academics and what are their coping strategies?
Findings regarding the third research question were obtained across qualitative data analysis. Table 6 and 7 display the results of content analysis conducted for the answers given by the academics regarding the open-ended questions at the end of the scale.  Table 6 shows that uncivil student behaviors vary, however, the most annoying ones are; playing with the cell phone during the lecture, making noise in the lesson, apathy and lack of motivation, and being late for class. The views of some participants on this subject are as follows: K12: "Distraction of students and sincerity with their technological tools, tendency to distrupt the lesson, being hopeless and aimless" K74: "Almost half of the class of students keep busy with the cell phone in hand. When I asked the question about the topic to the student who not listen to the lesson; he/she gives an answer irrelevant, nonchalantly like "oh yeah or exactly teacher I think .." and so on." K123: "Chatting with friends in class, busy with mobile phone, sloppy task or fail to do homework." When analyzed in general, these behaviors show parallelism with findings from quantitative data. In the data obtained from the scale items, it can be said that behaviors having the highest average in uncivil behaviors are similar to the findings obtained from qualitative data. The coping strategies of academics with these kinds of behaviors are given in Table 7.  Table 7 reveals that "verbal warning" is the most frequently employed method by academics followed by using attention grabbing materials and methods, motivating, warning, and banning use of cell phone in class. The views of some academics are as follows: no need for support. The academics reported that they did not need any support despite the discomfort about the uncivil behaviors of the students.

DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSION
In this study, not studying, being busy with the cell phone, and not listening to the lecture are the most frequently observed uncivil student behaviors by academics. Besides, harassment, threat, and insult are the least encountered behaviors. Another research result is that the longer the working period is, the lesser the chances for academics to witness incivility student behaviors. In this regard, Clark and Springer (2007), Erdem and Kocyigit (2019), Kaya, Sungurtekin and Deniz (2017), McKinne and Martin (2010), Phelps and Beneke (2008) found similar results. Sapanci and Kuyumcu-Vardar (2018) found that using mobile phone or tablet, entering and leaving the class without permission, not giving attention to the lesson, not bringing homework on time, plagiarism in projects and research, and coming to the class without preparation were the most common distruptive behaviors faced by academics. Though students are held responsible for uncivil behaviors as a general opinion, some research findings they are not the only reason at all. For instance; faculty-driven issues, as well, such as crowded classes (Bozpolat, Ugurlu, Usta & Simsek, 2016b;Knepp, 2012), lack of precaution and intervention policies for uncivil student behaviors on behalf of universities/faculties (Braxton, Bayer, & Noseworthy, 2004;Irwin & Cederblad, 2017), and inefficient or incorrect teaching techniques employed by academics (Bozpolat, Uğurlu, Usta, & Simsek, 2016a), communication problems (Kaya, Sungurtekin & Deniz, 2016), applying more of the traditional classroom management techniques (Twale & DeLuca, 2008). Incivility is often a reciprocal process; both students and faculty may contribute to a climate of disrespect for one another or the learning process. Among student-driven reasons are student's personal traits, characteristics of a course, university/faculty attitudes and environment, family, and surrounding. It is possible to conclude that incivility student behaviors are driven by a more complicated reason surfacing as a result of interaction between variables concerning the university/faculty and students' personality traits, features of their developmental period, adaptation to university, habits, physical, cognitive, and sentimental issues. All these results show that there is a need for policies formed through faculty-student cooperation to tackle these problems.
Qualitative findings of the research showed that playing with the cell phone, making noise in the lesson, apathy, lack of motivation, and being late for class were reported by academics as the most annoying behaviors. These findings support also the quantitative results of the study. Although the coping methods to overcome these problems vary over a broad range from traditional attitude to modernist attitude, the most frequently employed method is "verbal warning". Newton (2012) indicates that the most frequently employed coping strategies by academics for incivility student behaviors are insulting, turning a blind eye, refusing, threatening, and verbal warning. In a study by Albert et.al. (2010), the researchers ascertained that 86.2 of the academics use friendly verbal warnings, and 70% of them turn a blind eye for incivility behaviors. The study where Erdem and Kocyigit (2019) interviewed 19 academics revealed that the coping strategies employed by academics are verbal warning, turning a blind eye, and punishing. It is interesting to note that most academics do not think that they need any support to cope with these kinds of behaviors. This can be interpreted in two ways; either they find it pointless to get support on such an issue or they are concerned that it will be insufficient. Yet, research and teaching are two different concepts. Higher education goals should encompass conducting in-service training programs aiming to improve pedagogic competence of academics, and should enhance functionality of Guidance and Research Centers for both students and academics just as in Primary Education. Clearly, incivilities have a negative impact on the academe and overshadow the teaching-learning process. Decision-makers for higher education might make an arrangement to decrease uncivil student behaviors and increase faculty civility. It is vital that higher education institutions be aware of the situation, acknowledge incivility behaviors and their psychological and social impacts, and generate solutions.