Book review of "Cheating Lessons: Learning from Academic Dishonesty"

Abstract

Lang, James (2013). Lessons: Learning from Academic Dishonesty. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Pages: 251. Price: $26.95 USD. Hardcover.James M. Lang is an associate professor of English at Assumption College in Massachusetts where he serves as Director of the Center for Teaching Excellence. Dr. Lang has been a regular contributor to the Chronicle of Higher Education for more than a decade, especially on matters of teaching and learning in higher education and early career academics on the road to tenure. A series of submissions in the Chronicle in 2013 using the title Cheating Lessons lead me to place an advance order for Lang's book by the same name. Since the book's release, James Lang has given several invited lectures on learning environments and academic dishonesty.Cheating Lessons: Learning from Academic Dishonesty offers a refreshing lens through which to consider the phenomenon of academic dishonesty in higher education. Steering the reader away from the morally bankrupt theory of academic dishonesty, Lang brings readers to a more optimistic and constructive focus on the structure of learning environments themselves. Following parallel interests in academic dishonesty research and the field of cognitive psychology, Lang connects the two areas to bring our attention to contextual rather than students' entering characteristics or predispositions, peer-groups or campus-based features that have been reported to influence cheating behaviours. His connection brings forward strategies for to construct and teach a class that reduces the incentive and opportunity for students to cheat by increasing their desire and ability to learn (p. 56).Lang structures the book in three parts. He begins, in Part 1, by introducing the reader to the existing research in the area, characterized mainly by large-scale studies of selfreported incidence of student cheating. He next walks us through his theory of academic dishonesty using four illustrative case studies that focus on what makes learning environments inducing of academic dishonesty. The four factors at play according to Lang's interpretation of research and first-hand experience as a teacher are (1) an emphasis on performance by students, but also by assessment design, (2) high stakes riding on the outcome for students, (3) an extrinsic motivation for success on the part of students, and (4) a low expectation of success by students. Part 2 contains chapters on fostering intrinsic motivation, learning for mastery, lowering stakes, and instilling self-efficacy. In these chapters, Lang describes exemplary teachers from diverse disciplines who employ the kinds of innovative, learning-centred approaches he recommends. He highlights the matter of intrinsic motivation on the part of students as the most important factor, and often, the most challenging to instill. Then, in Part 3, Lang adds a fifth factor that extends beyond the level of the individual teacher to the campus climate. Here he advocates for ongoing dialogue among all members of campus communities about what academic dishonesty means, why academic integrity is important, and how it is most consistently handled. Lang extends the thinking on honor codes, and their apparent positive impact, to an interpretation that rather than being a precursor of low cheating campuses, they may instead be artifacts of campuses engaged in the kind of dialogue he suggests.I found the recurring point of interest for me in Lang's book to be the design of student assessment. Perhaps this should be obvious, since cheating is thought to occur, for the most part, on graded assessments. …