An easy trick to reduce cheating
(University of Nebraska-Lincoln website)
What can teachers do to help stem pervasive cheating among students?
Cognitive scientist Daniel Willingham has a suggestion. Willingham is a professor and director of graduate studies in psychology at the University of Virginia and author of “Why Don’t Students Like School?” His newly published book is “When Can You Trust The Experts? How to tell good science from bad in education.” This appeared on his Science and Educationblog.
By Daniel Willingham
Every teacher wants his or her students to be honest. It’s not just a question of fairness, it’s a life lesson.
The challenge is that people seem to have little qualm about cheating — so long as the cheating is relatively slight: peeking at just an answer or two on a neighbor’s quiz, for example. People want to maintain their own self-concept as an honest person, and small infractions allow them to think of themselves as “basically honest” while raking in the easy profit that dishonesty can afford (Mazar, Amir, & Ariely, 2008).
How can we encourage students to be more honest?
Christopher Bryan and his colleagues (Bryan, Adams, & Monin, 2012) had a clever
