Student agency has emerged as an important consideration in academic integrity debates, and many institutions are moving away from traditional punitive approaches of teaching academic integrity towards holistic educative approaches. However, a dearth of scholarly investigations exist that explore students' voices and perspectives on these educative approaches, and there is also a lack of studies on which strategies of learning about academic integrity students find useful to support their developing academic identities. Our presentation outlines both qualitative and quantitative data from an online survey and interviews with students who participated in a foundation unit for a Diploma course at Southern Cross University called Language and Learning in Your Discipline. This unit includes a holistic educative approach, where academic integrity is taught through a compulsory module, class activities and discussions, videos and interactive online resources, and embedded in assessments. The survey used in our study is based on one developed by Bretag et al. (2014) to explore attitudes and approaches to academic integrity, and we use recommendations from this important study to develop our educative approach. Our study suggests that giving students a range of resources and tools to learn about academic integrity and integrating an educative approach into multiple aspects of a unit, promotes greater agency for students in their approach to learning about academic integrity and allows them to see how academic integrity aligns with their academic and professional goals and existing values. We discuss the potential for this data to be used to continue to develop the unit to strengthen the educative approach to academic integrity, as well as how the approach might be adapted in other units and contexts.
Our interactive presentation will first present our data for 15 minutes, and proceed with three audience prompts. We would like to have a discussion with those in attendance around their approaches to academic integrity and how an embedded educative approach might be effective in their units, and we would appreciate if we could get feedback during the interactive session on how we might improve our approach. The three audience prompts are: i) What is student agency in relation to academic integrity? ii) Which aspects of the educative approach resonate the most with students and create a supportive environment for students to learn about academic integrity? iii) How can we support and encourage novice students in learning about academic integrity whilst ensuring procedural fairness?
Bretag, T., Mahmud, S., Wallace, M., Walker, R., McGowan, U., East, J., Green, M., Partridge, L. & James, C. (2014) ‘Teach us how to do it properly!’ An Australian academic integrity student survey. Studies in Higher Education, 39(7), 1150–1169, https://doi.org/10.1080/03075079.2013.777406