How to best measure academic dishonesty in students: A systematic review of self-report assessment methods and psychometric quality - Preprint

Abstract

Addressing a pervasive problem in educational institutions, investigation into academic dishonesty by students has produced a vast body of empirical research, mostly based on self-report measures. However, the literature repeatedly points to inconsistencies in assessment methods and unclear measurement quality. We conducted a preregistered systematic review to provide a comprehensive overview of self-report assessments (including past cheating behavior and cheating intentions), and to evaluate operationalizations and psychometric quality. In 256 instruments of 231 studies, 70% were unique self-report measures, meaning newly created or adapted instruments, and 38.7% of studies did not investigate or report psychometric quality criteria. As such, the academic dishonesty literature is no exception in questionable measurement practices (Flake & Fried, 2020), where reports often lack key measurement information, such as the full item list (missing in 32%) or the time frames for behavioral assessment (missing in 50.4%). Our findings also illustrate how a lack of psychometric understanding of the construct and inconsistencies regarding the spectrum of academic cheating behaviors (Simha & Cullen, 2012) threatens the interpretability and comparability of research findings. Our findings can assist researchers in the selection of suitable measures to assess academic dishonesty, and thereby raise the comparability, replicability and validity of study results.

Differential Effects of Honesty-Humility and Descriptive Norms Across the Seriousness Dimension of Academic Dishonesty

“…Theoretical models of the causes of academic dishonesty have inspired numerous studies that provide a wealth of empirical evidence on how dispositional and contextual determinants impact dishonesty (Lee et al, 2020;Murdock & Anderman, 2006;Whitley, 1998). Yet, it remains difficult to bridge the existing research traditions and come to a deeper understanding of the relative importance of those determinants of dishonesty due to strong inconsistencies in the definition and operationalization of dishonesty (Daumiller & Janke, 2020;Fritz et al, 2023). One problem concerning the operationalization of dishonesty is that prior research has often operated under the working assumption that different acts of dishonesty are driven by the same underlying mechanisms.…”