Inside Education 417, Assessment, Feedback & Academic Integrity (25-4-21)

Presented and produced by Seán Delaney.

This week my guest on the podcast is expert on assessment, feedback and academic integrity, Professor Phillip Dawson from Deakin University. Among the topics we discuss on the podcast are the following:

• How academic integrity is learned throughout our lives – and how even Peppa Pig has been known to flout academic integrity.


• What a secondary school teacher needs to know about academic integrity – values and technical skills


• Academic integrity travels with us: Medical students who have more academic integrity problems have more professional integrity problems as doctors


• Acknowledging student work that is original


• Scalable feedback practices at feedbackforlearning.org.


• Text matching software (e.g. Turn-it-in) can help provide feedback at scale.


• Recognising patterns in errors legitimately made by students on a module


• Estimated instances of cheating among university students, by “outsourcing” their work, range from 6% to 16%


• When the student signals that an assignment is tough, the temptation to cheat appears, literally.


• Intellectual streaking and intellectual candour (Margaret Bearman and Elizabeth Molloy. The importance of faculty sharing their own experiences of receiving feedback with students.


• Contract cheating and blackmail. Lesley Sefcik and Jon Yorke.


• University faculty are more likely to spot contract cheating when they are looking out for it.


• Initial suspicion versus investigation of contract cheating


• Resources to combat contract cheating from the Australian Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency.


• Cheating and Assessment Project


• The difference between referencing blunders and contract cheating


• Where students are more/less likely to cheat: types of work, disciplines


• The work of Tracey Bretag and colleagues


• Designing assessments to minimise the likelihood of contract cheating


• Authentic assessments


• Benefits of few, enforceable authentic restrictions


• Review of authentic assessments by Villarroel et al (2020)


• Article on authentic assessment and authentic feedback by Dawson, Carless and Lee (2021).


• Assessment rubrics Article by Dawson


• Article 1 and Article 2 on assessment by James Popham: and


• Analytical, holistic and co-constructed rubrics


• Alfie Kohn podcast


• Winstone and Bowd (2020): the need to disentangle assessment and feedback in higher education


• Pitt & Norton (2017) Student Responses to feedback


• Sustainable assessment and evaluative judgment


• One person who inspires Phillip is his boss, David Boud: https://www.deakin.edu.au/about-deakin/people/david-boud.


• One of David Boud’s articles on sustainable assessment.