Who's Cheating Whom? - The Diigo Meta page

• 23 Jul 09
  

  Christine Campbell
  • or.”  
  • Cheating is more common when students experience the academic tasks they’ve been
    given as boring, irrelevant, or overwhelming.
  • 15 more annotations...
  • • cheating is relatively rare in classrooms where the learning is genuinely
      engaging and meaningful to students and where a commitment to exploring
      significant ideas hasn’t been eclipsed by a single-minded emphasis on “rig
    • when students perceive that the ultimate goal of learning is to get good grades,
      they are more likely to see cheating as an acceptable, justifiable behavior,”
    • the more classrooms drew attention to students’ academic performance, the more
      students “observed and engaged in various types of cheating.”[11]
    • There was less cheating when they made it clear that the point was to enjoy the
      learning, when understanding mattered more than memorizing, and when mistakes
      were accepted as a natural result of exploration.[
    • But it would be pointless to cheat if you were interested in the learning itself
      because cheating can’t help you understand an idea
    • Competition is perhaps the single most toxic ingredient to be found in a
      classroom, and it is also a reliable predictor of cheating.
    • Competition typically has an adverse impact on relationships because each person
      comes to look at everyone else as obstacles to his or her own success.
    • Competition often erodes academic self-confidence (even for winners) – partly
      because students come to think of their competence as dependent on how many
      people they’ve beaten and partly because the dynamics of competition really do
      interfere with the development of higher-order thinking.[
    • If it’s true that cheating, or at least some versions of it, really is at an
      all-time high, that may well be because pressures to achieve are increasing,
      competitiveness is more rampant and virulent, and there is a stronger incentive
      to cut corners or break rules. In fact, we’re currently witnessing just such
      pressures not only on children but on teachers and administrators who are placed
      in an environment where everything depends on their students’ standardized test
      scores.[21]
    • People who play cooperative games don’t require reminders to be “good sports”
      because they’re working with one another toward a common goal.)
    • By working together, students not only are able to exchange information and
      divide up tasks but typically end up engaging in more sophisticated
      problem-solving strategies, which, in turn, results in more impressive learning
      on a range of measures.   Structured cooperation in the classroom also
      proves beneficial in terms of self-esteem, relationships, and motivation to
      learn
    • Alas, most collaboration is simply classified as cheating.
    • Even here, the intent appeared to be foiling cheaters rather than improving the
      quality of assessment and instruction. Or, to put it differently, the goal was
      to find ways to prevent students from being able to cheat rather than
      addressing the reasons they wanted to
      cheat -- or what the instructors regarded as cheating (and why).
    • Maybe a bigger problem is that teachers require students to memorize instead of
      teaching them how to think.”[
    • Such a perspective reminds us that how we educate students is the dog; cheating
      is just the tail.
• 

  John Rodgers

  cheating

• 22 Jul 09
  

  Matt Townsley

  Alfie talks about 'cheating' and how we can stop it.

  homework Kohn

• 

  Glenn Moses

  Article from Alfie Kohn on cheating and handling cheating.

  kohn professionaldevelopment cheating plagiarism

  • Lee Ross attracted some attention (at least within his field)
    by coining the term “fundamental attribution error.”  He defined this as a tendency to “underestimate the impact of situational factors and to overestimate the role of
    dispositional factors in controlling behavior.”
  • We
    frequently pay so much attention to character, personality, and individual responsibility that we overlook how profoundly the social environment affects what we do and
    who we are.
  • 39 more annotations...
  • • Specifically, we’re apt to assume that people who commit crimes are morally deficient, that the have-nots in our
      midst are lazy (or at least insufficiently resourceful), that children who fail to learn simply aren’t studying hard enough (or have unqualified
      teachers). In other words, we treat each instance of illegality, poverty, or academic difficulty as if it had never happened before and as if the individual in question was acting out of
      sheer perversity or incompetence.
    • is all about ‘Gotcha!
    • This
      continues to be true even though we’ve known for quite some time that the environment matters at least as much as individual character when trying to
      predict the occurrence of various types of cheating.
    • when teachers don’t seem to have a real
      connection with their students, or when they don’t seem to care much about them, students are more inclined to cheat.
    • Cheating is more common when students experience the academic tasks they’ve been given as boring, irrelevant, or
      overwhelming.
    • cheating is relatively rare in classrooms where the learning is genuinely engaging and meaningful to students and where a commitment to exploring
      significant ideas hasn’t been eclipsed by a single-minded emphasis on “rigor.”
    • (Interestingly, one of the mostly forgotten findings from that old Teachers College study was that “progressive school experiences are less conducive to deception than conventional school
      experiences” – a result that persisted even after the researchers controlled for age, IQ, and family background.   In fact, the more time students spent in either a progressive school or a traditional
      school, the greater the difference between the two in terms of cheating.)
    • “when students perceive that the ultimate goal of
      learning is to get good grades, they are more likely to see cheating as an
      acceptable, justifiable behavior,”
    • Cheating is
      particularly likely to flourish if schools use honor rolls and other
      incentives to heighten the salience of grades, or if parents offer financial
      inducements for good report cards
    • If students are led to focus on how well
      they’re doing more than on what they’re
      doing, they may do whatever they think is necessary to make it look as though
      they’re succeeding
    • There was less cheating when they made it clear that the point was to enjoy the learning, when understanding mattered more than memorizing, and when mistakes were accepted as a natural result of
      exploration.
    • Interestingly, these studies found that even students who acknowledged that it’s wrong to cheat were more likely to do so when the school culture placed a premium on results.
    • it would be pointless to cheat if you were interested in the learning itself because cheating can’t help you understand an idea.
    • But that environment – the values and policies of a classroom, a school, or a society – is decisive in determining how pervasive cheating will
      be.
    • What the data are telling us, like it or
      not, is that cheating is best understood as a symptom of problems with the priorities of schools and the practices of educators.
    • Competition is perhaps the single most toxic ingredient to be found in a classroom, and it is also a reliable predictor of
      cheating.
    • In short, a competitive school is to cheating as a warm, moist environment is to mold -- except
      that in the latter case we don’t content ourselves with condemning the mold spores for growing.
    • How ironic, then, that some of the adults who most vociferously deplore cheating also support competitive practices – and confuse competitiveness with
      excellence – with the result that cheating is more likely to occur.
    • Because competition, a relentless focus on achievement,
      and bad pedagogy aren’t new, it stands to reason that cheating isn’t exactly
      a recent development either.
    • In fact, Elliot Turiel compared surveys of
      students from the 1920s with those conducted today and found that about the
      same percentage admitted to cheating in both eras – an interesting challenge to
      those who view the past through a golden haze and seem to take a perverse
      satisfaction in thinking of our times as the worst ever.
    • In fact, we’re currently witnessing
      just such pressures not only on children but on teachers and administrators who
      are placed in an environment where everything depends on their students’
      standardized test scores.
    • If schools focus on relative achievement and lead
      students to do the same, it may be because they exist in a society where
      education is sometimes conceived as little more than a credentialing
      ritual.
    • Cheating could be seen as a rational choice
      in a culture of warped values.
    • Some kinds of cheating involve actions that are indisputably objectionable. Plagiarism is one
      example.
    • we should be able to agree
      that it’s wrong to use a specific concept or a verbatim passage from another
      source without giving credit if the objective is to deceive the reader about
      its origin.
    • cheating actually consists of a failure to abide by restrictions that may be
      arbitrary and difficult to defend
    • “I want to see what you can do, not what your neighbor can do.”
        (Or, if the implications were spelled out more precisely, “I want to see what you can do all by yourself, deprived of
      the resources and social support that characterize most well-functioning real-world environments, rather than seeing how much more you and your neighbors could
      accomplish together.”)
    • most collaboration is simply classified as cheating. End
      of discussion.
    • hat does it say about the instructor, and the education system, that assessment is geared largely to students’ ability to memorize?
    • s information being collected about
      students’ capacity to remember what they’ve read or heard for the purpose of helping them to learn more effectively -- or is the exercise more about sorting them (comparing
      students to one another) or controlling them (by using assessment to elicit compliance)?
    • Once we’ve decided that someone’s action is morally wrong, her efforts
      to challenge that premise, no matter how well-reasoned, merely serve to confirm
      our view of her immorality.
    • the goal was to find ways to prevent students from being able to cheat rather than addressing
      the reasons they wanted to cheat -- or what the instructors regarded as
      cheating (and why).
    • “Maybe
      a bigger problem is that teachers require students to memorize instead of teaching them how to think.”
    • “finally convinced me that the kinds of research papers I had customarily assigned
      were not accomplishing what I had in mind.”
    • suppose that cheating could be at least partly curtailed by tightly monitoring and regulating students or by repeatedly
      announcing the dire penalties that await anyone who breaks the rules.
    • “In our stampede to fight what some call a ‘plague’ of plagiarism, we
      risk becoming the enemies rather than the mentors of our students; we are replacing the student-teacher relationship with the criminal-police
      relationship. . . .Worst of all, we risk not recognizing that our own pedagogy needs reform. . . [if it] encourages plagiarism because it discourages
      learning.”
    • It is sometimes said that students who take forbidden shortcuts with their homework will just end up “cheating themselves” because
      they will not derive any intellectual benefits from doing the assignment. This assertion, too, is
      often accepted on faith rather than prompting us to ask just how likely it is that the assignment really would prove valuable if it had been completed in
      accordance with instructions.
    • Outraged condemnations of cheating, at least in such instances, may turn out to have more to do with power than with
      either ethics or pedagogy.  Perhaps what actually elicits that outrage is not a lack of integrity on the part of students so much as a lack of
      conformity.
    • Such a perspective reminds us that how we educate students is the dog; cheating is just the tail.
• 09 May 09
  

  m k

  what leads students to do what they’re not supposed to and what does that tell us about their schooling.

• 12 Mar 09
  

  mark richards

  curriculum cms

• 31 Mar 08
  

  Mario A Núñez

  plagio

  • We’ve
    learned, first of all, that when teachers don’t seem to have a real
    connection with their students, or when they don’t seem to care much about
    them, students are more inclined to cheat.[5] 
    That’s a very straightforward finding, and not a particularly
    surprising one, but if taken seriously it has the effect of shifting our
    attention and reshaping the discussion.
  • Cheating is more common when students
    experience the academic tasks they’ve been given as boring, irrelevant, or
    overwhelming.
  • 11 more annotations...
  • • To put this point positively,
      cheating is relatively rare in classrooms where the learning is genuinely
      engaging and meaningful to students and where a commitment to exploring
      significant ideas hasn’t been eclipsed by a single-minded emphasis on “rigor.”
      
    • “when students perceive that the ultimate goal of
      learning is to get good grades, they are more likely to see cheating as an
      acceptable, justifiable behavior,” as one group of researchers summarized
      their findings in 2001.[9]
    • Cheating is
      particularly likely to flourish if schools use honor rolls and other
      incentives to heighten the salience of grades, or if parents offer financial
      inducements for good report cards[10] -- in other words, if students are not
      merely rewarded for academic success, but are also rewarded for being
      rewarded.
    • Thus, a recent
      study of more than 300 students in two California high schools confirmed that
      the more classrooms drew attention to students’ academic performance, the
      more students “observed and engaged in various types of cheating.”[11]
    • When you look at the kind of schooling that’s
      all about superior results and “raising the bar,” you tend to find a variety
      of unwelcome consequences:[12]  less
      interest in learning for its own sake, less willingness to take on challenging
      tasks (since the point is to produce good results, not to take intellectual
      risks), more superficial thinking . . . and more cheating.
    • That is exactly what Eric Anderman, a leading expert on
      the subject, and his colleagues have found. 
      In a 1998 study of middle school students, those who “perceived that
      their schools emphasized performance [as opposed to learning] goals were more
      likely to report engaging in cheating behaviors.” 
    • More cheating took
      place when teachers emphasized good grades, high test scores, and being smart.  There was less cheating when they made it
      clear that the point was to enjoy the learning,
    • when understanding mattered more
      than memorizing, and when mistakes were accepted as a natural result of
      exploration.[13]
    • What the data are telling us, like it or
      not, is that cheating is best understood as a symptom of problems with the
      priorities of schools and the practices of educators.  To lose sight of that fact by condemning
      the kids who cheat and ignoring the context is to fall into the trap that Lee
      Ross warned us about.
    • One major cause of cheating, then, is an academic
      environment in which students feel pressured to improve their performance even
      if doing so involves methods that they, themselves, regard as unethical.  But when you look carefully at the research
      that confirms this discovery, you begin to notice that the worst environments
      are those in which the pressure is experienced in terms of one’s standing relative to others.  
    • In fact, Elliot Turiel compared surveys of
      students from the 1920s with those conducted today and found that about the
      same percentage admitted to cheating in both eras – an interesting challenge to
      those who view the past through a golden haze and seem to take a perverse
      satisfaction in thinking of our times as the worst ever.[
• 01 Jun 05
  

  m h

  Education

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