Improving academic integrity through assessment design

The term ‘academic integrity’ has gained currency in recent decades, an interest in better understanding how and why students breach principles of academic honesty has long-since been of interest to Higher Education teachers. However, a clear understanding of how assessment design can be used to reduce student cheating and thereby maintain or even increase academic integrity has not yet been reached. The purpose of this scoping review was to investigate how assessment design is being used to promote academic integrity and to understand the types of recommendations being made for using assessment design to support academic integrity. The review was conducted using the five stage scoping model proposed by Arksey and O’Malley (2005). Findings highlight the trend towards personalising assessments to decrease instances of academic dishonesty while promoting student engagement. Findings also highlight the importance of embedding assessments into learning and teaching strategies that focus on developing those skills directly associated with academic integrity. Finally, most studies highlight the importance of providing timely feedback for students as a means of fostering integrity based skills that can transfer to other contexts, recognising that feedback goes beyond the one-way transmission model from teacher to student and instead conceptualises feedback as a dialogic process to support the development of self-regulating skills among learners (c.f. Carless et al., 2011, Hounsell, 2007; Price et al., 2010; Sadler, 2010)