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Higher Listenings
What If Students Cared Too Much to Cheat?
Cheating feels like an unavoidable reality—but what if the antidote isn’t stricter policies or plagiarism checkers, but emotion? Neuroscience tells us that students are more likely to invest in what they find meaningful. The question is, how do we help them care?
We catch up with renowned speaker, author, and educator Flower Darby to explore the link between emotion and learning—and how fostering connection, and even embracing our own likeability can nudge students to do the work that learning requires.
Guest Bio
An internationally-renowned instructor, author, and speaker, Flower Darby inspires educators to bring an equity-minded lens to enhance their teaching practices. As Associate Director of the Teaching for Learning Center at the University of Missouri, she draws on 28+ years of teaching across diverse subjects and modalities. Darby’s work empowers faculty to create inclusive learning experiences, and her publications include The Norton Guide to Equity-Minded Teaching (2023) and Small Teaching Online (2019).
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We all have fallen into a way of thinking that you know learning is cold and rational the pursuit of knowledge. There is no room for emotions in these processes. But actually that's wrong. Based on recent neuroscience, we know that emotions and cognition are inexplicably linked. It's fascinating, right? Emotions are incredibly powerful. They drive behavior and actions, and so if we want our students to do the work of learning that is required, we can help them care about what they're doing, about what they're learning.
Speaker 2:Cheating is a topic as old as higher education, as faculty will attest. It feels personal, almost insulting, when we're on the receiving end. Well, our guest today suggests that our ability to demonstrate pedagogical caring, and even our own likability, can go a long way in nudging students to engage in behaviors that foster meaningful learning. You're in for a real treat and a dose of optimism. Flower Darby is an internationally sought after speaker, author and educator, and I think you'll find her perspective as refreshing and practical as it is deeply human. Welcome to Higher Listenings.
Speaker 3:I think it's really tempting, when a student cheats, to attribute to them some kind of moral failing. But you're really coming at this very differently. You conceive of this as kind of a simple psychological equation Low value, low care, high anxiety is temptation. Of this as kind of a simple psychological equation Low value, low care, high anxiety is temptation. That is a kind of a different way of trying to come to understand the motivations behind why students might cheat. So say a bit more about your understanding of the behavior of cheating and where it comes from.
Speaker 1:Essentially, what the psychology literature shows us is that there are conditions that, as you said, lead to increased temptation to cheat.
Speaker 1:It's not a moral failing on the part of our students, it's the circumstances that they find themselves in. So when the stakes are high maybe a high-pressure exam or significant paper that is worth a lot, when they are feeling pinched on time and who isn't these days and when it feels like busy work or it seems unrewarding, that is a recipe to lead to cheating. It's always been the case that helping students know why they're being asked to do the work will foster increased intrinsic motivation. We know that. We know that from our own experience. If we are faced with a tedious task maybe we're serving on a committee and the work seems meaningless and we don't see the purpose of that work it's really hard to engage deeply and in a meaningful way. I do believe there's increased awareness now of the need to message that value, that purpose, to start with. Why, as Simon Sinek would say, to help students see why it is that we're asking them to do what we're asking them to do, as one more way to help them to choose to do that work themselves.
Speaker 2:Okay. So driving home in rush hour flower which you may do on occasion in any North American city will tell you that almost everyone seems to love a shortcut. So whether they're speeding through a yellow light or butting into an exit at the last possible moment, my pet peeve. But what makes shortcuts so enticing? And why are students any different? Or are they?
Speaker 1:Right. So I think it's important to remind ourselves, as I've heard it said, that students look an awful lot like people. Right, we're all just people and we are wired the same way. Shortcuts appeal to us, and this is actually something that has really benefited our species. It is not a moral failing. It's something that we are hardwired to do and that has actually enhanced our survivability. So let's kind of look in the mirror a little bit and recognize that we ourselves are all tempted to cut corners at various times. It's not something that we need to judge our students for. It's something that we need to acknowledge as central to the human experience and then think about how we can design ways to help students resist that temptation, if we really do want them to do the work for themselves.
Speaker 3:It really is a kind of interesting design challenge to try to create the sort of environment in which they're more likely to embrace the hard work of doing the work right and getting the value out of that. One of the elements of design that seems to have gained a lot of interest in recent years, particularly in higher ed, is this notion of nudging creating an environment in which nudging is enabled in some way. What is that exactly, and how do you think we might use that to steer students toward behaving with more integrity?
Speaker 1:The psychology of the nudge. It comes from a very popular book by behavioral economists, and the title of the book is Nudge. It's about helping people make better choices. So one very concrete thing that we can do is to really think deeply, examine our syllabus. Is everything that we're asking students to do really necessary for them to learn?
Speaker 1:Maybe there are things that we can cut, so we need to be able to identify for ourselves what is the purpose of this thing that I'm asking students to do. And, as we were just saying a minute ago, then we need to communicate that in a very clear and explicit way where we tell students here's what I want you to do, here's why I want you to do it, and then clearly, here's how to do it as well. That's one example. I will give you one more, and that is to offer students choice wherever possible, right? So let's just say that you have a research paper and that is something that you've always had in your class, but we know that ChatGPT is so good at writing things like that, so we might have an opportunity here to allow students to choose what format they want to represent their knowledge, how they want to show what they know no-transcript year.
Speaker 2:We were able to do our own research report and I remember becoming an expert in in the topic that I chose, which is a lot of fun and and I'm much more invested in that than you know other courses where it's like, okay, pick from these five topics to write your essay about, and I mean there's some choice there. But you know not, not that same level of flexibility.
Speaker 1:Listeners here may want to think a little bit more about. Okay, where can I let students have some voice in their experience in this class? Are there topics? Or can I structure an assignment such that they should choose something that's important to them and their community and their concerns for their own future right? Our students care passionately about all kinds of things affecting their communities, their careers, their global impact, so let's put that to work and offer them voice and choice wherever we can.
Speaker 3:I think it's not, frankly, just a good thing to do for students, but it's good for the health of the instructor. For myself as a philosophy professor, grading the same paper over and over and over again was soul-crushing, whereas giving them choice and then getting really inspired work that varied quite broadly across the topic space was much more engaging for me as a grader than it was otherwise.
Speaker 1:Brad, that's a really important point and I want to highlight how faculty are struggling right now. We know that these are tough times and they have been tough for a solid four, coming up on five years now. So finding ways to help us enjoy our work and feel that it is more rewarding, more fulfilling our work and feel that it is more rewarding, more fulfilling what you just described is a great way of enhancing instructor well-being, which I would argue is necessary to help our students flourish as well.
Speaker 2:So I want to go back to the kind of environment that we create in our classrooms. Part of the challenge I see here is that when there's too much focus on preventing cheating like giving lectures about it or lengthy syllabus statements we risk creating that us versus them dynamic. And I'm not suggesting that students don't need to understand the consequences of taking shortcuts, but it does seem to make the job of building trust and a sense of belonging that much harder. So how does focusing on trust and belonging and care actually reduce cheating and how do we avoid undercutting those efforts? Because, you know, at some point we may have to talk about the consequences of actually taking a shortcut?
Speaker 1:I actually want to zoom out, not just cheating, but let's talk for a few minutes about how building trust and fostering a sense of belonging actually enhances learning in deeply powerful ways. Students come into our classes with a healthy degree of mistrust. They have been taught by their prior educational experiences to have their defenses up as soon as they enter our classroom or click into our online class. They are on guard. So when that happens, what that does is it leads to increased anxiety, right? What is this professor going to be like? How am I going to survive this class, especially in that first day or that first week of class when it seems so overwhelming the amount of work that we have to do? That degree of anxiety actually diverts cognitive resources away from cognition. So when we are actively working to build trust, it actually helps students lower their defenses and therefore we free up quite a bit more cognitive energy to do the work of learning. Now, the same exact thing is true of developing or fostering that sense of belonging.
Speaker 1:We know from the literature that people don't just decide they belong. The group has to kind of extend that to somebody. Don't just decide they belong, the group has to kind of extend that to somebody. So if I'm in your class and I look around and most of the other students don't look like me, or maybe I'm the first one in my family to go to college and I'm really not sure I actually have what it takes, that level of psychological pain has the exact same result where cognitive resources are diverted from the work of learning. So building trust, extending belonging, creating and sustaining a warm and supportive class environment in person and online all of these are ways to help enhance that learning and it's going to help students like the instructor better, right, and so if I care about you as my instructor and I think that you care about me, it's going to help me make that choice to do my work for myself.
Speaker 3:The interpersonal dynamic between instructor and student is so vital a component of the learning environment, and when it's positive, things go well, and when it's not, it doesn't go well. It creates a kind of pressure, it seems to me, on me as an instructor. I feel a sort of pressure to show up in a certain way. How do you counsel reorienting a thought like that toward a much more positive appreciation for the opportunity that I have when I walk into a classroom to create these connections?
Speaker 1:We have plenty of colleagues who struggle with this or who don't see this as part of their job, and so really, I believe that we have an opportunity to invite a reconsideration of these things. We know that teaching and learning is inherently relational. We know that there's a high degree of sociality to learning. The interactions that happen in a classroom or an online class environment, those are really important. So sometimes instructors kind of push back on this and they think, well, I'm not there to be my student's best friend, it doesn't matter if they like me or not. That's not actually true. It does matter whether they like you in terms of whether they are able to learn and whether they choose to engage in the behaviors that foster learning.
Speaker 1:But for some people who maybe there's some introverts listening, maybe there's people whose personality traits don't exactly align with what we're saying here, I do have a really practical recommendation, and that is to demonstrate pedagogical caring. Okay, this is an idea that I first kind of came across in Josh Eiler's book how Humans Learn. Pedagogical caring is about providing very detailed instructions for our students, providing that transparency, being a thoughtful professor who is intentional in everything that we're asking students to do. That is a way of demonstrating to students that we do care about them and their success, that we are here to support them, and so that's a nice kind of a more structured way to help people for whom all this warm, fuzzy stuff may feel a little uncomfortable, and that's a step that we can invite people to take. Is pedagogical caring through effective teaching and learning design.
Speaker 3:I am trained as an analytic philosopher and so for me a focus on rational thought and bold rational logic has kind of driven a lot of my work, and it took me a long time to sort of come around to the warmer side of things. There's a wonderful quote by William James that the emotions are not always immediately subject to reason, but they're always immediately subject to action, and I think we can all appreciate that. Emotions are obviously a powerful driver of behavior, whether it's an impulse to buy on Amazon or sending an email we might immediately regret, which I have fortunately learned to avoid. But how can we channel these kinds of forces to help students with integrity? How can we actually leverage the power of emotion in this conversation?
Speaker 1:Well, I'm so glad that you shared with me that the power of logic has been central to your educational career, because I'm going to blow a hole in that right now. Ready.
Speaker 3:I'm ready. I'm ready.
Speaker 1:You know your experience specifically, but also in higher education, in academia we all have fallen into a way of thinking that you know learning is cold and rational the pursuit of knowledge.
Speaker 1:There is no room for emotions in these processes. But actually that's wrong. Based on recent neuroscience, we know that emotions and cognition are inextricably linked. So no shame, no blame for folks who have not really thought about this before, but it's fascinating, right, that if we cannot actually think without involving the emotions and what we also know, as you just said, emotions are incredibly powerful. They drive behavior and actions, and so, if we want our students to do the work of learning that is required, we can help them care about what they're doing, about what they're learning and we touched on this earlier with conversation about relevancy, right, like, if I have some say in what I'm going to do, that's going to be more relevant for me. So I'm going to care more about that task, and you alluded to that as well. So I just want to share one more thing on this particular point, because it's my favorite point in the whole world, and get ready again for your mind to be blown.
Speaker 3:Here it comes.
Speaker 1:Based on the work of the leading affective researcher in education, mary Helen Imranino-Yang. Effective researcher in education, mary Helen Imranino-Yang. She argues, based on her research, that we can only think deeply about things that we care about. It is neurobiologically impossible to think deeply about something that we don't care about. So helping students to see what we love about what they're learning and why it's important for them, why they're going to be better people when they have this information, that is a key way to take advantage of what we know from emotion science to help students again choose to do the work of learning.
Speaker 2:Have you been converted then, Brad? I've been converted, so I wonder if we could talk a bit about how this sort of plays out in everyday teaching. What are some of those techniques that listeners can use to reduce that temptation to cheat and get students more invested in what they're actually doing, what they're actually learning?
Speaker 1:I love what one of my co-authors, mays Imad, does when she's introducing a new topic in her biology class. She literally says to her students why should you care about this topic that we're about to learn? And she talks to her students about how we have limited cognitive resources on a daily basis. You have to choose to expend valuable mental energy on doing the work of learning and so, being very explicit and I know Mays, I know this is not one and done. She says one time, why should you care? It's a frequent message.
Speaker 1:So that's one thing that I would encourage us to do at a very small and practical level. Doesn't take very much time. But there's lots of other very practical things that we can do. One that comes immediately to mind is to take the traditional class format. I'm thinking of a large enrollment lecture where there might be two or three major exams and that's the bulk of the student's grade. That's a perfect recipe for cheating, right? If there are only one or two or three chances where my entire grade is dependent on my performance on that assessment, boy, will I be more tempted to cheat. A very practical thing that we can do is to take those two or three major exams and break them up into eight or 10 or 12 unit tests instead. That's a very practical thing we can do to reduce that temptation to cheat is lower the stakes.
Speaker 3:One of the things we have been circling around in this conversation is the fact that learning is effortful, that there is some struggle that is necessary. Too much, though, is going to increase anxiety and perhaps lead toward a satisfactory outcome for yourself, which means ultimately cheating. How do we make transparent to them the way in which we will help and the way in which they need to struggle in order to actually get the value out of this?
Speaker 1:I'm thinking of a phrase of another sort of academic hero of mine, michelle Pekansky-Brock, talks about, and that is to be a warm demander. We cannot lower our standards. We won't be serving our students well if we do, but we can provide that kind of support and that coaching that you were just describing, that are to our students that we do want them to be successful, not stay in that stuck place, and that that phrase of being a warm demander might help some listeners kind of begin to conceptualize how they can do that in their daily practice.
Speaker 2:We talked about the struggle of learning and I wonder you know what role transparency plays there as well if we normalize and can speak to the fact that this next module this is a challenging module for us to get through and here's where you may get tripped up a little bit, but you've got to push through that to come out the other side. I wonder what your thoughts are there on normalizing struggle for our students and how that might affect their motivation to actually push through some of the more challenging work that they have to do in a course.
Speaker 1:Absolutely. I'm increasingly convinced that our work as educators sounds a lot more like coaching than we may previously have considered. But what you're really describing? I'm thinking of the work of sociologist Lisa Nunn, who has a book out called College Belonging, and she makes a distinction between social belonging and academic belonging. And what you just described, eric, is a perfect example of academic belonging extending that, normalizing the struggle.
Speaker 1:There are many ways that we can do this. You described a perfect one. Again, the research shows that if we tell students, hey, this is tough, I believe in you, put in the effort, you're going to get there, we're going to get there together. I'm on your side. That will help students feel more motivated, help them be ready to do that work of learning, and then none would also add all kinds of other ideas. Here's one of my favorites, and that is to just be transparent with students about times when we have struggled academically and how we were able to overcome those challenges to get to where we are today. Right, that's a really great way to integrate that idea of transparency and normalizing the struggle as a way of extending academic belonging as well.
Speaker 2:Well, it's interesting because I had a failure recently just on the job front my boss. I had a failure recently just on the job front, my boss, who's a growth marketer by trade, but he looks at everything like an experiment. So it wasn't like it was a failure, it was like, well, okay, well, we ran the experiment and it didn't work, so let's do something a little bit different next time. It kind of shifts the perspective. Love it Right. So we have a lot of empathy for instructors. They pour time, energy and probably chunks of their weekend into designing courses, so when students do cheat it can feel like a personal affront. How do you go about winning hearts and minds with faculty when you're talking about this topic?
Speaker 1:that you led even this question with empathy because that is basically my answer is that we have to lead with empathy when we're talking with our colleagues who may be at a different point of their journey. Right, I believe that becoming more inclusive, being more student-centered which is everything we've been talking about today it is a journey that higher education does not necessarily facilitate. It's not the way that we prepare professors to teach. It's not the experience that we ourselves had when we were in graduate school and undergrads. One of my favorite phrases I've already used it is no blame, no shame. The individual you are not to blame for maybe not having thought about this before. The system that we work in does not facilitate these ideas. But there is something else really important about what you just said, and that is how do we change hearts and minds?
Speaker 1:There is a robust literature that shows that getting people to think differently about something that they feel strongly about has less to do with reason and rationale and empirical arguments. It has more to do with cultivating that emotional connection, that liking. So, for one very practical example, in the past I observed that if I talked with professors about student success, I could almost physically see a wall go up where they're like I hate that term. That's what student service administrators, that's what the provost is always talking about, that's what the retention people are talking about, and I changed the way that I introduced that topic and I now say to folks hey, we want our students to learn right. So for me it's about appealing, making that emotional appeal, helping students, helping faculty to just reconsider based on likability, establishing rapport with our colleagues as well, not blaming and shaming, not criticizing people for not having been given an opportunity to think about these things in these ways before. I think those are ways to invite that reconsideration that we're encouraging today.
Speaker 2:I feel like Brad's reeling from these comments as he moves from the world of logic into emotional appeals.
Speaker 3:It's killing me. It's killing me. I remember vividly, still to this day this is now what 35 years ago or something, the first time a student cheated in my course that I knew the anger that welled up in me over that, and I think one of the things that you've spoken to today that really helps is really to understand the causes of that behavior as not being directed at you personally. So, anyway, I do think that this emotional dimension of the dynamic is an important one and kind of reframing both the source of it but also, as Eric was suggesting, kind of thinking about the signal that you're getting as something other than a personal message, but more about the environment, the circumstances, the student's own set of circumstances in the moment, that kind of thing. So what keeps you going? Circumstances in the moment, that kind of thing. So what keeps you going?
Speaker 1:There are days when I have my head in the sand about the future of higher education in an age of AI. There are days when I feel frustrated, demotivated, discouraged, right. So let's be honest, I think that's important, but really, what keeps me going is my students. Really, what keeps me going is my students. There is abundant research that increased education increases socioeconomic mobility for individuals who are able to take advantage of that, and we know that some groups of students have a history in our traditional higher education environment and culture of not being as successful. That bothers me deeply. For me, of not being as successful, that bothers me deeply. For me, any student who comes into my class deserves an equal chance to be just as successful, regardless of their history, regardless of their social identities. And it's the student stories that keep me going, so I will share one.
Speaker 1:A few years ago, I was teaching an online graduate class and the class was actually about technological fluency. It's about how do we use tech well, no matter what we're doing, no matter what our job is and this was before COVID-19, but I had this sense even then that you know being able to communicate effectively in a video setting, just like we're doing right now or like we'll be doing in the webinar. That's actually an important sort of professional skill that my graduate students need to master. So I had a requirement that students should record videos of themselves with their cameras on and such, and there was one student in particular who refused. This was an introduction video, where I required it was worth points that students had to have their cameras on. Looking at the camera, she didn't. She recorded an audio and submitted a photo of herself and her small son. I docked points. I got annoyed.
Speaker 1:At the end of the semester she wrote to me. She asked for the opportunity to resubmit an assignment because she was really aiming for an A and she was just a little bit shy of that goal. And then she said this. She said there's something that's been bothering me for this whole semester and I just want to let you know that introductory video post. She chose not to record it with her camera on because the week prior she had been beat up by the father of her son and she had visible damage on her face and she was embarrassed and ashamed and did not want other students or me to see her in that way.
Speaker 1:She was pursuing a master's degree as a single mom in order to make a better life for herself and her son, and that moment shook me, and I have not forgotten the importance of education. It changes people's lives. It allows them to make a better world for themselves, for their families, for their communities and for all of us. Globally, we know that a more educated citizenry is important for the well-being of this democracy. These are the things that keep me going when I get frustrated.
Speaker 3:I'm getting all verklempt over here. That's a powerful story and your passion is just. It's a wonder to behold. So very much appreciate the work that you do here.
Speaker 2:Thank you. Thank you so much for taking time to be with us today.
Speaker 1:Well, as you can tell, it truly is my pleasure, my passion and my joy. Thank you.
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