teaching online Academic Integrity

academic integrity in the online classroom

James Lang wrote a book called, Cheating Lessons: Lessons from Academic Dishonesty where he realized that if he examined the problem of cheating through the lens of cognitive theory and tried to understand cheating as an inappropriate response to a learning environment that wasn’t working for the student, he could potentially empower individual faculty members to respond more effectively to academic dishonesty by modifying the learning environments they constructed. In the following article published in the Chronicle of Higher Education, James Lang summarizes some of his research. In the Best Practices section below, we offer more ideas on how you can make a few small changes to your current assessment structure to help you create a learning environment that promotes academic integrity.

Who cheats and why?

The essential conditions that tend to be in place where we see cheating flourish:

Strong emphasis on performance
A context of extremely high stakes
Extrinsic motivation for success
A low expectation of success

The environments that reduce ”the incentive and opportunity” to cheat are the same environments that will lead to greater learning based on the learning science of how students learn.

Best Practices

LEARNING FOR MASTERY

Design assessments that give students

Multiple ways to demonstrate their knowledge or skill
Choice of type of performance
Multiple attempts at the performance

Multi-choice Assessments

Give students plenty of opportunities
Give students control over process

Assignment Group Grading Rules

Offer multiple ways for students to demonstrate their learning, and then use the assignment group grading rules to drop the lowest score or two. This way, if a student misses an assignment, they still have the confidence they will need to complete the course. But it also indirectly gives students performance choice.

Multiple Attempts

You might also encourage students to redo their work – nothing says mastery more than letting a student retry and resubmit until they get it right.

LOWERING THE STAKES

Rather than have three big high-stakes exams, you might consider adding in some lower stakes assessments to reduce student anxiety and improve learning and reduce the likelihood of cheating in your classroom environment.

Frequent low-stakes assessments

To actively engage students with video lectures, movies, short films, textbook materials, or other course materials, it is a good idea to have more frequent lower stakes classroom assessment techniques like open-book quizzes, discussions, and other learning activities. This encourages students to pay attention, and to process and retrieve the information.

Question Banks

Set up your open-book quizzes by randomly drawing a smaller set of questions from a larger set of questions, so students are less likely to get the same questions on their quizzes. This encourages students to interact with the course materials more often.

Show one question at a time

Set each quiz to only show one question at a time, so students can’t print off the quiz in one fell swoop and share it with their classmates.

Shuffle Answers

Select the shuffle answers option, so it makes it a little harder to cheat by students texting each other the answers.

Time Limit

Set a time limit, so students are truly practicing retrieval. Tell students to read or engage with the course material that you will quiz them on before they start the quiz, and then let them practice retrieving that information. Don’t give them enough time to look up every answer.

FOSTERING INTRINSIC MOTIVATION

The third condition that induces cheating occurs in an environment where students find themselves in an environment where the task is seen as an obstacle to overcome, so they are more likely to cheat. In this extrinsically motivated environment, learners care about what happens after the performance rather than enjoying the performance itself.

The missing element is intrinsic motivation – the intrinsic motivation to master the material for the sake of the understanding! Grounded and authentic assessments in addition to problem-based learning are three different ways to encourage intrinsic motivation in your students' learning.

Grounded assessments are grounded in the unique experience in four different ways:

Time. Students connect course content to current events, conversations, trends, or research they experience uniquely within the confines of that semester. This reduces cheating when the events change every semester or year.
Place. Students connect to something in the local community, whether that means their dorm, their campus, or the city in which their institution is located.
Personal. Students consider how course content shapes or could be used to understand a specific experience in their lives. Offer students short essay questions that connect the course content to their personal lives – so they can make connections with something they are familiar with – this makes retrieval easier in the long run because they are putting the new information into their own knowledge framework.
Interdisciplinary. Students draw connections not only between your course content and other disciplines they have studied, but especially between your course and other specific courses they have taken, or co-curricular activities like lectures, performances, and other learning-oriented events.

Authentic Assessments ask students to perform real-world tasks that demonstrate meaningful application of essential knowledge and skills. The task is typically evaluated using a rubric.

Project-based Learning is a teaching method where students gain knowledge and skills by working for an extended period of time investigating and responding to an authentic, engaging, and complex question, problem, or challenge.

INSTILLING SELF-EFFICACY

Metacognition is a “student’s awareness of their level of understanding of a topic.”

Students with excellent metacognitive skills have a clear and accurate picture of how well they know the material they are studying; those with poor metacognitive skills have an inaccurate picture of their learning. Weaker students are grossly overconfident in how well they understand the material. As a result, weaker students don’t study as much as they need to truly understand the material. They take an exam. They are confident they have done well, and they are stunned when they find out they have done poorly. Students with low self-efficacy or who are under confident in their learning and who might cheat, can gain confidence by consistently doing well on low stakes assessments.

Improving student metacognition - The best way to improve metacognitive is to use brief, low-stakes assignments with immediate, or almost-immediate feedback where students can gauge their learning. Think-pair-share, minute papers, in class polling.
Improving faculty communication - The second way that we can instill self-efficacy in our students is by improving our communication. We need to be encouraging while also giving them the tools that they need to succeed in the course.

ADDITIONAL RESOURCES

Angelo, T. A. (1993). Classroom assessment technique: A handbook for college teachers. Jossey-Bass Publishers, San Francisco, CA.

Bachore, M. M. (2016). The Nature, Causes and Practices of Academic Dishonesty/Cheating in Higher Education: The Case of Hawassa University. Journal of Education and Practice, 7(19), 14–20.

Bain, K. (2004). What the best colleges teachers do. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA.

Gerdeman, R. D., & ERIC Clearinghouse for Community Colleges, L. A. C. (2000). Academic Dishonesty and the Community College. ERIC Digest.

Gharib, Afshin, et. al. "Cheat Sheet or Open Book? A Comparison of the Effects of Exam Types on Performance, Retention, and Anxiety," Psychology Research, Vol. 2, No. 8, 469-478, August 2012.

Hopkins, R., Lyle, K., Hieb, J., & Ralston, P. (2016). Spaced Retrieval Practice Increases College Students' Short- and Long-Term Retention of Mathematics Knowledge. Educational Psychology Review, 28 (4), 853-873. Retrieved November 6, 2020, from http://www.jstor.org/stable/44955367

Lang, J. M. (2013). Cheating lessons: Learning from academic dishonesty. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Lang, J. M. (2016). Small teaching: Everyday lessons from the science of learning. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.

Nath, L., & Lovaglia, M. (2009). Cheating on multiple-choice exams: monitoring, assessment, and optional assignment. College Teaching, 57(1), 3-8. Retrieved November 6, 2020, from http://www.jstor.org/stable/25763354

National Research Council. 2000. How People Learn: Brain, Mind, Experience, and School: Expanded Edition. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. https://doi.org/10.17226/9853

Rettinger, D., & Kramer, Y. (2009). Situational and Personal Causes of Student Cheating. Research in Higher Education, 50(3), 293-313. Retrieved November 6, 2020, from http://www.jstor.org/stable/29782921

Sterngold, A. (2004). Confronting Plagiarism: How Conventional Teaching Invites Cyber-Cheating. Change, 36 (3), 16-21. Retrieved November 6, 2020, from http://www.jstor.org/stable/40177968

Vyas, Gaurang. "A Comparative Study of Open Book Exam and Closed Book Exam," International Research Journal, Vol. II, Issue 7, August 2009.

Weber, L., McBee, J., & Krebs, J. (1983). Take Home Tests: An Experimental Study. Research in Higher Education, 18(4), 473-483. Retrieved November 6, 2020, from http://www.jstor.org.libproxyccc.nau.edu/stable/40195531

Wiley. 'Academic Integrity in the Age of Learning." [Accessed: September 30, 2020].