educational justice

General English (GE) is a course offered in all education programs by the Iranian medical education system. However, no curriculum has been developed for the course and teachers develop their syllabus, which largely relies on textbooks. This study aimed to investigate what textbooks used for teaching GE at the Iranian medical sciences universities and what language skills are covered in the textbooks. To this end, six medical universities were targeted and the textbooks used by them were collected and analyzed. The results showed that the textbooks used in the universities differed in terms of number (one or many) and type (medical, non-medical, and a combination of them). Certain textbooks were used commonly in most universities. The textbooks also covered the language skills differentially with vocabulary and reading being the most popular and listening and pronunciation being the least popular ones. The study concludes that there is no harmony in the GE textbooks in the universities, which results from the lack of a unified national curriculum. The study argues that differences in the textbooks can adversely affect the quality of education and educational justice and has implications for organizing English language teaching at medical universities.

Purpose: This research aimed to investigate the mediating role of attitudes to cheating in the relationship between social support and educational justice with cheating behavior. Methodology: Present study was cross-sectional from type of correlation. The research population was all high school female students of Tehran city in 2018-19 academic years with number of 120000 people. The sample size was calculated according to Cochran's formula 400 people who were selected by multi-stage cluster sampling method. The research instruments were the questionnaires of attitudes to cheating (Fealy & et al, 2014), social support (Zimet & et al, 1988), educational justice (Golparvar, 2011) and cheating behavior (Newsted & et al, 1996). Data were analyzed by structural equation modeling method with using path analysis in Amos-23 software. Findings: The findings showed that social support and educational justice had a negative and direct effect on attitudes to cheating and cheating behavior and attitudes to cheating had a positive and direct effect on cheating behavior. Also, social support and educational justice with mediating attitudes to cheating had a negative and indirect effect on cheating behavior (P<0.01). In addition, the model of mediating role of attitudes to cheating in the relationship between social support and educational justice with cheating behavior had a good fit. Conclusion: Based on the results, to reduce cheating behavior can be developed and implemented through workshops programs to change in social support, educational justice and attitudes to cheating.