Academic Integrity Through Course Design
Learning environments that reduce the incentive and opportunity for students to cheat can also increase their motivation and mastery of course material. Many times, academic integrity and success are the result of careful planning, preparation, and awareness of resources on the part of the student. In addition to the list below of five potential aspects of a course designed to promote academic integrity and student learning, we have developed an assignment that can be given to students very early in a semester to help chart a Roadmap to Success in any given class.
-Adapted from Lang, J. (2013). Cheating Lessons: Learning from Academic Dishonesty. Boston, MA: Harvard University Press.
Foster Students' Intrinsic Motivation
- Instead of thinking about a course as covering certain content in a field, frame the course as an opportunity for students to master the content through engaging open-ended, authentic problems, questions, or challenges.
- Engage students in the course through articulating (by both you and them) the relevance of the course material to their current lives, the local community, or their future professions
Place Emphasis on Learning for Mastery Over Performance
- Provide students with choices in how they demonstrate learning, whether via options within an assignment or options of assignments, to encourage focus on mastery learning over performance
Use Frequent, Low-Stakes Assessments
- Incorporate short breaks in a class, or in the very beginning or end, to ask students questions about content understanding and connections between course material
- Decrease the pressure on each assignment as a motivation for dishonesty - in so doing, enable feedback on learning throughout a course, and build student self-efficacy...
Build Student Self-Efficacy
- The belief that one is able to achieve the learning expectations of a course diminishes motivation for dishonesty, so instead of using early assignments to "weed students out," try to give students opportunities for early success (rigorous, but achievable)
- Convey to students what it takes to be successful in a course (perhaps even quoting effective strategies/practices from former students who excelled in the course)
Prepare Students for Ethical Considerations in the Field/Profession
- Introduce students to what it means to have integrity as a psychologist, economist, historian, biologist, etc. and explain why integrity in the field matters
- Discuss case studies from the field that reflect both ethical and unethical motives and their outcomes to give students a sense of why developing a habit of integrity in their work now will matter after they graduate
[retrieved April 17, 2020: https://teaching.berkeley.edu/resources/design/academic-integrity]
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