Cheating Lessons: Learning from Academic Dishonesty – James Lang
Facilitator: Shannon Sipes, SoTL Director, Center for Innovative Teaching and Learning
When students engage in academically dishonest behaviors, they may be responding to subtle pressures in the learning environment that interfere with deep learning and nudge them toward cheating. Hence if we can gain a better understanding of the reasons for academically dishonest behavior, we can use that knowledge to improve our course design, teaching practices, and communication with students. This session will explore some of the reasons for academic dishonesty that have special relevance for our current online and hybrid courses, and invite participants to consider practices and assessments that reduce the incentives and opportunities for dishonesty.
James M. Lang is a Professor of English and the Director of the D’Amour Center for Teaching Excellence at Assumption College in Worcester, MA. He is the author of five books, the most recent of which are Distracted: Why Students Can’t Focus and What You Can Do About It (Basic Books, 2020), Small Teaching: Everyday Lessons from the Science of Learning (Jossey-Bass, 2016), and Cheating Lessons: Learning from Academic Dishonesty (Harvard University Press, 2013). Lang writes a monthly column on teaching and learning for The Chronicle of Higher Education; his work has been appearing in the Chronicle since 1999. His book reviews and public scholarship on higher education have appeared in a wide variety of newspapers and magazines, including The Conversation, Time, the Boston Globe, and Chicago Tribune. He edits a series of books on teaching and learning in higher education for West Virginia University Press; he co-edited the second book in the series, Teaching the Literature Survey Course: New Strategies for College Faculty (2018). He has conducted workshops on teaching for faculty at more than a hundred colleges or universities in the US and abroad, and consulted for the United Nations on the development of teaching materials in ethics and integrity for college faculty. In September of 2016 he received a Fulbright Specialist grant to work with three universities in Colombia on the creation of a MOOC on teaching and learning in STEM education. He has a BA in English and Philosophy from the University of Notre Dame, an MA in English from St. Louis University, and a Ph.D. in English from Northwestern University.