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To refrain from cheating, students need to adopt an array of discipline-specific standards of academic integrity. The high rates of cheating in college show evidence that many undergraduates fall short of these standards. Little research has examined how instructors teach academic integrity, leaving gaps in our knowledge about how academic integrity develops. To examine how instructors teach academic integrity, this article reports on two studies of college courses. Researchers attended lectures and collected course materials for classes in the social sciences (N = 56, Study 1) and engineering (N = 5, Study 2) and coded all content for discussions of cheating. Instructors rarely discussed or defined academic integrity. Explanations of why students should avoid cheating were infrequent and typically referenced punishment. Consequently, many students misremembered class academic integrity policies. This research suggests that many students do not receive the instruction needed to learn academic integrity.

Nearly all students believe academic cheating is wrong, yet few students say they would report witnessed acts of cheating. To explain this apparent tension, the present research examined college students' reasoning about whether to report plagiarism or other forms of cheating. Study 1 examined students' conflicts when deciding whether to report cheating. Most students gave reasons against reporting a peer (e.g., social and physical consequences, a lack of responsibility to report) as well as reasons in favor of reporting (e.g., concerns about welfare, justice, and fairness). Study 2 provided experimental confirmation that the contextual factors referenced by Study 1 participants in fact influenced decisions about whether to report cheating. Overall, the findings indicate that students often decide against reporting peers' acts of cheating, though not due to a lack of concern about integrity. Rather, students may refrain from reporting because of conflicting concerns, lack of information about school policy, and perceived better alternatives to reporting.

Young children's misbehaviours can be challenging to interpret, evaluate, and intervene on. In turn, adults' interventions on children's transgressions inform children about how others view their actions. In the current research, we examined adult responses to recordings of everyday transgressions committed by young children. This research adopted a new method for assessing adults' interpretations, evaluations, and proposed interventions in response to children's transgressions. In two studies, participants watched videos of young children engaging in actions that could be considered wrong, such as hitting someone else or making a mess. Across both studies, adults expressed uncertainty about how to interpret children's transgressions. Different transgressions led adults to make different intention attributions and evaluations, which in turn related to how they said they would intervene on the child's behaviour. This research has implications for early childhood educators, and develops a new tool for investigating these implications.

As they navigate academic life, students must decide whether the acts of copying they encounter constitute plagiarism, and whether those acts are wrong. The present study investigated students' perceptions, evaluations, and reasoning about copying. In interviews about hypothetical scenarios involving copying, undergraduates (N = 60) reported whether the characters' actions constituted plagiarism, whether the actions were wrong, and why. Students' perceptions varied depending on textual similarity and type of academic task. When students perceived an act as plagiarism, they almost always believed it was wrong. In explaining their evaluations of plagiarism, students commonly referenced concerns about "learning consequences," "rules," and "fairness." As expected, most students expressed uncertainty about what constitutes plagiarism and whether copying was wrong. The findings validate a new method and highlight the need for a situated theoretical model of decision-making that goes beyond stable characteristics and incorporates perceptions, evaluations, and reasoning about specific texts and contexts.

In the current paper, we develop an approach to early science pedagogy that is based on insights about how complex adaptive systems function. Complexity approaches have an important advantage over traditional information-processing approaches: They anticipate the proverbial 'mind with a mind of its own' without having to postulate exclusively mental constructs. They also offer insights about key determinants of learning and effective pedagogy, again without postulating exclusively mental constructs. For complex adaptive systems, learning depends on the presence of sufficiently salient novelty (i.e., variability), and it depends on the presence of sufficiently salient repetitions or ordered patterns (i.e., stability). Science learning, therefore, requires science-relevant novelty and science-relevant patterns of order. Equipped with these insights, we address two challenges of early science pedagogy: (1) how to combine children's self-guided explorations with teachers' strategic interventions, and (2) how to minimize the chances of generating misconceptions about science. The answer lies in creating a learning context that maximizes science-relevant variability and science-relevant stability. If both aspects are abundantly available, a child's self-guided explorations are effective. Conversely, if either aspect is missing, efforts must be made to add them strategically to a child's experience. Adding science-relevant stability is particularly challenging, yet crucial to avoid science misconceptions.

Presenter: Talia WaltzerCo-authors: Elina Berman, Audun Dahl

Embodied cognition is sometimes presented as an alternativeto computational approaches, the argument being thatcognition is strongly influenced by an agent's body movement.However, the exact nature of this influence is still uncertain. Inthe current paper, we add to the conversation by analyzingadults’ predictions in a high-ambiguity task: Adults had todecide which of two objects would sink faster (or slower) inwater. Ambiguity was achieved by pitting object volume andobject mass against buoyancy: The winning object of a pair wassometimes the bigger and heavier one, and sometimes it wasthe smaller and lighter one. The crucial manipulation waswhether the stimuli were real-life objects or 2D pictures. Allparticipants were presented with pictures of the objects duringa training phase (when they received feedback on theirpredictions). Real-life objects were either present during thephase prior to the training (jars-first condition), or during thephase after the training (jars-last condition). Findings showeda clear influence of hands-on experiences: When allowed tohold the objects, adults were more likely to demonstrate asimplistic focus on object heaviness. These results call for amore nuanced understanding of the effect of embodiedexperiences on the stability of representations. Whileembodiment sometimes can help distinguish relevant fromirrelevant information, we show that it can also destabilizerepresentations acquired through visual information.

Moral Disengagement: How People Do Harm and Live With Themselves By Albert Bandura. New York, NY: Macmillan Higher Education, 2015. 544 pp. Hardcover, $47. In 2013, Edward Snowden began leaking [...]

Why do so many adolescents cheat despite judging that cheating is wrong? Two studies tested a new model of cheating in high school. In Study 1, 85 high schoolers in the Western U.S. reported their perceptions, evaluations, and motivations surrounding their own and hypothetical cheating. In Study 2, 83 teachers reported their views about cheating; we also analyzed course syllabi. About half of the adolescents reported unintentional cheating, and many judged their own cheating—but not hypothetical cheating—as acceptable. Decisions to cheat were responses to competing pressures, low value placed on the assignment, and other considerations. Study 2 revealed teacher‐student disagreements about cheating, and minimal content about academic integrity in syllabi. The findings supported the proposed model of adolescent cheating. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Academic cheating, a common and consequential form of dishonesty, has puzzled moral psychologists and educators for decades. The present research examined a new theoretical approach to the perceptions, evaluations, and motivations that shape students' decisions to cheat. We tested key predictions of this approach by systematically examining students' accounts of their own cheating. In two studies, we interviewed undergraduates in psychology (n = 68) and engineering (n = 123) classes about their past experiences with plagiarism or other cheating. Interviews assessed students' perceptions of whether they were cheating, their evaluations of whether their actions were okay, and their motivations for doing what they did. Most students did not initially recognize their acts as cheating. While students generally thought cheating was wrong, they often judged the exceptional cases in which they cheated to be acceptable, citing concerns such as assignment goals and task feasibility. The findings suggest that perceptions, evaluations, and competing motivations play a key role in students' decisions to cheat. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We are grateful for the invitation to participate in this exchange with a scholar as eminent as Bandura about a topic as interesting as moral disengagement. Because of space limitations, [...]

Young children's misbehaviours can be challenging to interpret, evaluate, and intervene on. In turn, adults' interventions on children's transgressions inform children about how others view their actions. In the current research, we examined adult responses to recordings of everyday transgressions committed by young children. This research adopted a new method for assessing adults' interpretations, evaluations, and proposed interventions in response to children's transgressions. In two studies, participants watched videos of young children engaging in actions that could be considered wrong, such as hitting someone else or making a mess. Across both studies, adults expressed uncertainty about how to interpret children's transgressions. Different transgressions led adults to make different intention attributions and evaluations, which in turn related to how they said they would intervene on the child's behaviour. This research has implications for early childhood educators, and develops a new tool for investigating these implications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As they navigate academic life, students must decide whether the acts of copying they encounter constitute plagiarism, and whether those acts are wrong. The present study investigated students' perceptions, evaluations, and reasoning about copying. In interviews about hypothetical scenarios involving copying, undergraduates (N = 60) reported whether the characters' actions constituted plagiarism, whether the actions were wrong, and why. Students' perceptions varied depending on textual similarity and type of academic task. When students perceived an act as plagiarism, they almost always believed it was wrong. In explaining their evaluations of plagiarism, students commonly referenced concerns about learning consequences, rules, and fairness. As expected, most students expressed uncertainty about what constitutes plagiarism and whether copying was wrong. The findings validate a new method and highlight the need for a situated theoretical model of decision-making that goes beyond stable characteristics and incorporates perceptions, evaluations, and reasoning about specific texts and contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]