3. Applying Teaching & Learning Strategies
Promoting Academic Integrity
The rise in popularity and use of course-sharing sites, essay-writing services, and generative artificial intelligence tools have led to increasing concerns regarding academic integrity. The ease of access to these services and tools have often left professors scrambling to determine the best strategies to promote academic integrity and prevent inappropriate behaviours that undermine the integrity of our credentials.
While most often associated with written components of a research project, breaches in academic integrity can occur irregardless of format.
A Multi-Pronged Approach
Breaches in academic integrity are often unintentional, stemming from a misunderstanding of academic norms, assumptions, or practices within specific contexts. Preventing unintentional breaches typically involves clarifying the expectations for your assignment as well as teaching troublesome tasks (Bens, 2022, Penaluna & Ross, 2022).
To prevent intentional misconduct, you could:
1. Address the five main mechanisms of prevention
Birks & Clare (2023), for example, highlight strategies that:
- increase risk and effort (e.g., supervise assessment tasks);
- reduce reward and provocation (e.g., reduce strict deadlines); and
- remove excuses (e.g., be explicit about what constitutes a breach of academic integrity).
2. Remove unfavourable learning conditions
Lang (2013) found that the four main conditions that pressure students into cheating include:
- an emphasis on performance (e.g., only grading the final product);
- high stakes riding on the outcome (e.g., pass/fail course);
- an extrinsic motivation for success (e.g., focus on grade average); and
- a low expectation of success (e.g., lack of self-confidence).
3. Focus on Relationality, Respect, and Reciprocity
Indigenous authors Poitras Pratt & Gladue (2022) stress the importance of re-framing academic integrity through Indigenous values and traditions, including:
- Relationality: where relationships between members are prioritized over individual gains.
- Respect: where academic relationships are based on mutual respect for the work and role of each member.
- Reciprocity: where each member is responsible, committed, and accountable to the wellness and wholeness of all other members of the community.
Addressing academic integrity requires a multi-pronged approach that must be conceived as an extension of the commitment to integrity that you have fostered through relationality, respect, and reciprocity since day one in your classroom.
Strategies for Success
- Convey confidence that students can, with effort, complete the assignment with integrity.
- Address academic integrity in such a way as to avoid creating an adversarial environment of suspicion and distrust. For example:
- Check your tone and language.
- Avoid overemphasizing academic integrity or allowing academic integrity to become a dominating theme of the course.
- Be explicit about what constitutes a breach of academic integrity in the context of your assignment. For example:
- Connect appropriate and inappropriate behaviours to learning outcomes of the assignment.
- Invite students to collaboratively determine appropriate and inappropriate behaviours.
- Address academic integrity on your assignment instructions sheet.
- To prepare students for the assignment:
- Provide scenario-based tutorials or discussions that highlight key academic integrity concerns for your course or assignment.
- Develop early, low stakes (i.e., “mini”) assignments that help you identify students who may not understand research expectations or who need additional support.
- Emphasize process over product (i.e., learning over performance) in your instructions and assessment criteria.
- Complete portions of the project during class time (e.g., searching for sources, developing an outline, writing thesis statements, peer editing, etc.).
- Require students to disclose the use of software tools in their assignment, and how such tools contributed to the assignment.
- Ask students to submit multiple drafts.
- Reduce penalties for late submissions.
In the next sections, we’ll expand on a few additional strategies that can help support academic integrity outcomes:
- Engaging students
- Leveraging Artificial Intelligence
- Teaching Troublesome Tasks
- Developing Metacognition and Self-Regulation
- Connecting Students with a Support System
